Aomori Japanese Dining — Restaurant in Borneo

TL; DR Peaceful & Zen atmosphere with beautiful decorations. Food was overall pleasant but with somewhat of a limited selection. Drinks were a little underwhelming but could be due to choosing the wrong drink. Would come back for the atmosphere and the instagam-able environment.

Environment: Restaurant is nicely decorated, clean and very instagram-able. There's also calming and Zen music being played in the background further enhancing the calming atmosphere.

Food: The food was pleasant, we ordered the salmon belly karaage, chuka wakame, salmon sashimi, chicken katsu toji teishoku and chicken karaage soba. Out of the ones we ordered, the chicken katsu toji was flavorful, the chicken karaage soba had nicely fried chicken but underwhelming soba noodles. The salmon belly was decent (but would recommend to finish it quick or only order when you have more than 2pax, as it is quite oily, and would not taste good when cold). The rest was pretty standard for Japanese restaurants. Portion was pretty good though, we were quite full at the end.

Drinks: the drinks we ordered were the iced matcha and iced strawberry matcha. They were disappointing. Firstly, it looks nothing like the pictures. Secondly, it does not look appetising. Thirdly, it tastes like your run of the mill strawberry flavor Dutch lady milk (for the iced strawberry matcha). Suggest to order other drinks than what we had.

Food options and selections: the options were quite limited. You can treat this as a typical teishoku Japanese restaurant, as there's not a lot of options for sushi, sashimi or other stuff. They do have a little bit of this and that but not sufficient to say they have a good selection of items

Service: service was pretty quick with our food arriving within 5-10 minutes after ordering. Staff was pretty professional

Overall a decent Japanese restaurant with...

Perhaps it was the items I ordered, or maybe my expectations for Japanese cuisine are simply high—but overall, I left feeling slightly underwhelmed.

I had two drinks, a 5-piece sashimi set, and two main courses. Surprisingly, the 5-piece salmon belly sashimi (RM26.90) was excellent. The salmon had a satisfying bite, tasted incredibly fresh, and honestly surpassed what I’ve had at most Japanese restaurant.

The drinks arrived next—matcha latte (RM8.90) and peach tea (RM14.90) The peach tea was refreshing and enjoyable. However, the matcha latte was a letdown: extremely diluted to the point where it tasted like plain water. It lacked the richness of matcha and even the creaminess of milk.

As for the mains, I ordered the Beef Veggie Teishoku with Omurice (RM35.90) and Assorted Tempura with Soba (RM24.90). The beef was flavourful but slightly tough. The omurice, while a bit bland on its own, paired decently with the miso soup provided.

Unfortunately, the Assorted Tempura with Soba was the weakest dish. The soba was bland and lacked any depth of flavour. The tempura pieces were small and similarly underwhelming in taste.

Overall, the main issue I found was the lack of flavour across several dishes, which ultimately made my first experience at this restaurant quite underwhelming. Indeed it was filling for my stomach, but didn’t satisfy...

The overall outlook of the place is nice and clean, thumbs up to that. Nice presentation to the sashimi however felt it was cut a little too thin. My husband ordered the cold soba with tempura. You can taste the oil on the tempura like it was reused too too many times. I ordered the beef set, decent but nothing to shout about. Oh ya, though they have macha on the menu but was surprised they don’t serve green tea, the basic of drinks in a...