Hanabi Izakaya Sake and Dining Solaris KL — Restaurant in Kuala Lumpur

Summary: New izakaya that overreaches on its offerings, with quality suffering as a result. Service will improve, but with such a massive menu, I'm not sure how they'll ever be truly consistent

Solaris MK is suddenly seeing a glut of new izakaya; Sushi Wang Izakaya, Hiro Yakitori, Hanabi, and a new one under construction.

Hanabi is nicely laid out with a decent counter area and a bunch of tables. Private rooms somewhere in the back I heard as well.

The biggest problem with Hanabi is evident the second you see the menu; it's TWENTY pages long. It includes everything from yakitori, sushi, sushi rolls, RAMEN, soba and udon, tempura, fried food (agemono), drinking snacks (otsumami) and on and on.

I admire their ambition, but for a restaurant serving foreign food, you need to specialise or the quality suffers, unless you're willing to hire a lot of expensive chefs (and from what I can tell, they are not).

The torikawa chicken skin yakitori was confoundingly served with sauce (tare) making it sweet and soggy, the sushi was just a mess (the rice portion (shari) was too small and fell apart, the shime saba was way too sour, and the cooked shrimp was poorly defrosted). The only decent things I tried were the chicken gizzard (though underseasoned) and the cucumber-sour plum roll (pretty much perfect!). If even among my small tasting there are this many problems, I'm truly concerned how the other 200 items on their menu are.

The service is also a bit hapless - I mentioned the sauce on the chicken skin and the waitress nodded that she understood, but did not reply, promptly walked around in a circle and didn't mention it to anyone.

I wish them the best, but this isn't coming close to competing with my mainstay Chitose for the best...

The place only opened for a month. While I wish you guys all the best in running the restaurant, I’m not sure if I’m a returning customer.

We ordered

Edamame: it’s over cooked and way too soft Unagi don (Eel don, as they named it): It was okay but a bit too sweet and the rice was disappointingly plain white rice Wagyu roll: we cancelled this Sashimi moriawase: We told the waitress we wanted sashimi moriawase but after a very long wait with two or three reminders and follow ups, we were served three kind sashimi. They changed it for us, but the quality of the sashimi, for a lack of better word; were horrible. The salmon belly tasted weird and the torch salman was over torched and it just disintegrated when we picked it up.

That aside, they were opened for a month but the waitress seems cluelessly a day old working for them. I asked her if the don comes with miso soup and she told me the miso soup is finish but when we walked in, she told us the store just opened?

I’m not sure if she didn’t understand English well or what.

Overall, the restaurant seemed to be run by a group of young dudes - who.. all vapes/smokes? Half way while waiting for our food, some of them dropped by in and just started smoking right in front of the shop and we were seated outside. Wind was blowing and it’s in our face. I mean owner or not, common courtesy to not smoke within a restaurant vicinity?

I wouldn’t recommend. But who knows they’d improve with...

I BEEN HERE MANY TIMES ! No matter how good your food is, it won't be the same because you have a bad employee. The rest of your staff are all very friendly, except one of them . I was having dinner with friends and I had to leave early so I wanted to pay mine first. I mentioned to him that I wanted to split the bill, but he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, so I repeated it a second time and patiently told him what I had eaten. After that, he looked at his colleague angrily. I asked him nicely if he could split the bill? Halo? I didn't force you to split it for me ! he started to say in an impatient tone ! Then he sighed there and kept making that annoyed sound, such as "Tsk" or this impatient sound. It seems like I did something that caused you a lot of trouble. I want to say, I'm asking you politely, I'm not forcing you to do something you can't do, right? If you can't, just tell me you can't. Does your attitude respect customers? Your food prices and service charges are not too low. Is this service attitude really OK with customer ? If don't believe me, check back the cctv ☺️ I make payment around 12am on 14/10/2023,...