Warakuya Japanese Garden — Restaurant in Iskandar Puteri

DO NOT GO TO THIS RESTAURANT!!

Tl;dr - not so fresh food paired with hilariously terrible service and tacky atmosphere.

The queue for the dinner service was ridiculously long with more than 10 families queueing on benches sipping terrible lemon tea. We waited for a solid 30mins before getting our table.

We were seated at a table where the mouldy ceiling was leaking and drops of water dripped on the table and in our drinks. The ambient lights on our chair were also spoiled and the ambiance of the place looked tacky and cheap. We requested to change tables but were moved to another table that had a broken tabletop patched with paper. There was a harsh spotlight pointing right at the table and an ear piercing ice crushing machine near the table.

They upsell the fish for a nicer plate and call it an Omakase. We were told that several fishes that we ordered were unavailable and were recommended a more ridiculously expensive fish instead. It seems more like a beauty salon trying to upsell their customers rather than an established restaurant with ready supply of what is on the menu.

This Warakuya is trying to be like a Haidilao outlet with warm towels and a designated waiter, but once we gave our order, the service stopped. When a passing family’s child threw a toy truck into the middle of our table, none of the staff approached to check on us, only one wearing a maid costume just sheepishly wiping the water spill.

There were flies flying about, which was worrying seeing how there are raw fish being on display. The sashimi wasn’t as fresh and they attempted to package it as three of our party had stomachaches afterwards. Their food has recipes that use a lot of prawns to spice up the taste, making it seem more Chinese than Japanese food.

We decided to hightail out of that restaurant and while we were rushing out, we noticed that they gave our old table that had a leaky ceiling to another family, without fixing the problem. The waiter tried to bribe us with a discount card amounting to 10% of our total bill, but we respectfully turned them down as we were never going to come back to this restaurant.

Overall, the quality of the restaurant has fallen greatly since the last time I went and it was a hilariously terrible experience seeing how we spent a lot of money there on not fresh food and almost no service paired with the upsell . Will definitely not recommend it to anyone and will not ever...

We recently visited this EXTREMELY disappointed with the overall experience. Unfortunately, the quality of the food, the service, TOTALLY NOT WORTH the value.

The service staff displayed poor attitudes. ETC, the young lady who handed us hot towels did so with an unfriendly demeanor. our orders was missing, and we had to follow up three times before it was finally served. There was no effort to assist with alcohol refills, even after multiple requests. We had to wait until we had completely finished the bottle before any staff attended to us. Staff rushed to clear plates immediately after we finished, which felt like they were hurrying to close rather than prioritizing customer satisfaction.

Food ah; • The cold soba was served with a raw quail egg, which wasn’t explained by the staff. While this may be a standard preparation, a simple explanation would have been appreciated, especially for diners unfamiliar with it.

• The restaurant seemed understaffed, even though it wasn’t during peak hours. • As a VIP member, I was disappointed to receive a reused membership card that was visibly dirty and held together with tape.

Although we had high hopes based on longggg queue, poor service + staff attitude ultimately ruined what was supposed to be a pleasant outing. This will likely be our first and last visit!!!!!!!

For anyone considering dining here, I’d recommend reading reviews beforehand to avoid disappointment. Sadly, the experience was not worth the price we paid.

Total damaged...

My experience in this restaurant was good until the waiter came to take our order. We wanted a whole fish for sashimi and sake soup but waiter said that there's no whole fishes left in the kitchen. It was only 6pm. He then started to promote lobster sashimi and sake soup for it when we rejected him twice. When we ordered the sashimi platter, he was promoting us to get omakase (not indicated anywhere in the menu), which is sashimi platter plus an additional spoon of uni for each pax. We had to ask him thrice about the price, which he kept responding by telling us about the contents of the omakase (I'm not sure if he understood our question correctly or he is purely avoiding our question). After asking him the price for a couple of times, he mentioned that it's RM188 per pax while the original sashimi set that we wanted to order is only RM99.

Went to Google and found that quite a lot of people have experienced the same thing with the pricey omakase.

Hope that this can be improved on as it sounds sketchy when the waiter said "I can do something extra for you" and proceeds to promote expensive food such as omakase and lobster.

We definitely won't mind if the restaurant comes up with a separate printed menu for omakase of different tiers and pricings.

We have been to this branch a few times before and had been visiting them since their sashimi were fresh and nice but the quality this time round is subpar and cannot be compared to what we had...