Oreno French&Italian Ginza Kabukiza mae — Restaurant in Tokyo

Restaurant is located on the second floor of building, can take building elevator or restaurant stairs to access 2nd floor of restaurant.

We made reservation on Google but for some reason, restaurant staff said it was for a different restaurant when I showed them our email confirmation. Anyway after a few back and forth exchanges to confirm this is the restaurant we tried to book and want to dine in, we were seated (luckily there were still tables still available).

We had the cheese plate, large caesar salad and king crab roll wrapped in avocado as starters to share amongst the four of us. All tasted good but not overwhelming. The server had mixed up our order and brought us carpaccio instead but once I told the staff the order was incorrect, the server who took our order came back and immediately apologized for the mix up and reconfirmed the appetizer that we had originally ordered which was the king crab roll.

For mains, we ordered the blue crab tomato sauce pasta, eel risotto, foie gras steak, braised wagyu beef.

For the steak with foie gras, the steak temperature was cooked perfectly but personally found it a little bit too salty so was a little bit disappointed since it was the star of the show. However the other mains tasted great.

The pasta with crab had an enticing aroma of the sea, garlic, herbs . The texture of the pasta is perfectly cooked (note they do put the whole crab in including the shell so its not just crab meat).

My teen devoured the whole plate of eel risotto before I could get a bite so I am assuming it was nothing less than great. 😉

The braised wagyu dish was lovely as the meat just melts in your mouth.

For dessert we had the seasonal mont blanc (with purple potatoes) and the passion fruit/mango pudding.

The mont blanc was built of ice cream surrounded by meringue pieces (?) and it had a slightly tartness to it which balances out well with the overall sweetness of the dessert. It was then topped with the purple potatoe puree at the table. This was shared amongst the 3 of us and it was the perfect ending...

We passed this restaurant while walking to our hotel and thought we’d come back and give it a try. Great decision. The food was excellent. My wife and I split the large Caesar salad (which was a little too big) and an order of bread with truffle butter. She had the Wagyu beef dish and I had the petit size Rossini filet. Both were delicious although I thought mine was better. The Rossini was medium rare with foie gras on top that was seared on the bottom and had a delicious peppercorn sauce. It was served on a bed of mashed potatoes and the sauce was superb. The foie grad patty was amazingly delicious. The restaurant was busy even at 3 pm in a Sunday but we were able to sit at the upstairs bar and watch the chefs in action which was fun. They were winding down from the lunch rush and prepping for dinner so the sous chef was slicing a huge quantity of amazingly thin mushroom slices and prepping sauces for the dinner service. The pasta chef and the pizza chef were spinning out the last orders from late lunches. Few words were exchanged and it looked like a carefully choreographed ballet. The bill including the large salad, bread, mains, a glass of wine and a glass of beer and the service charge was about $73 US which by Los Angeles standards is remarkably low. I don’t think we could have gotten the main dishes alone for that in LA. The only annoying thing was the service charge of 500 yen per person which we haven’t seen anywhere else in Japan in our 2 weeks here so far. But I understand that it’s Ginza and rent is expensive. So that’s about a 10% service charge which is still below LA...

I haven’t given anywhere 1 star before I think and I’m excited to go off on this place.

Let’s start with the service. I thought the service charge of 500 yen was going to be incorporated into the price of the food if I didn’t get enough. My mistake. Bartender seemed very dismissive of me, I was there solo and only ordering soft drinks. I felt very unwanted there which was surprising as the bottom floor was mostly empty.

The atmosphere was passable, upstairs seems like a family restaurant. Downstairs was a bar and a couple of tables. The place has no heart so when the service is bad it’s not a great place to be. I was out at the end of the counter near the stairs and kitchen which didn’t have a wide pathway so when people walked past they had to skirt around me.

The food, I’ve been to Japan a couple of times and I know that if you get western food expecting it to be like back home you’ll be disappointed. This took it to a new level. I got the extra large bolognese as I was loading for the marathon the next day. When my friends messaged me asking how it was all I could say was it’s not good and there’s lot of it. No sauce, just mince with I assume some garlic. Fettuccine which didn’t bother me regardless of it being spaghetti bolognese. The only thing to note was the pile of Parmesan cheese on top which was too much.

Overall I hated this place, every aspect was terrible and getting slugged 500yen on top of 2000 for a bolognese and 2 drinks...