Sommo — Restaurant in Oaxaca

QUICK REVEIW

Trendy and slightly pretentious joint, well presented but average Sushi (Lacking flavour) and served without ginger and wasabi. Decent cocktail concepts but over iced and overpriced by 30%

Worth a visit if you can get a table upstairs and have cash to burn.

LONG REVIEW

I love concept joints and don’t mind paying a little extra for quality and creativity. However, whilst this place certainly has some style, it also failed on too many points to hit five stars.

My credentials for this review come from 30 years in the food, drink, entertainment and hospitality industries.

Firstly we tried to make a reservation through google chat. We were offered two time slots. We choose 9pm and we’re asked to send a message through what’s app, which we did asking for confirmation of our booking. It took 24 hours to then be told there was no reservation for us.

I expressed my disappointment and that it was my 50th birthday. They then got back to me and offered us a slot at 9.30 which we took.

When I arrived with my 14 year old son there was some whispering between the hostesses and it was clear that is not what they were expecting. We were then shown to a very noisy coffee table in the downstairs cocktail bar, not in the upstairs restaurant. Not ideal by any means as the music is loud and you can barely hold a conversation.

An American waiter greeted us and was, to his credit, very friendly, professional and on-it. BUT… my pet hate. Scan the QR code for the menu. WTF… we aren’t in Covid now.. phone screens are tiny and impersonal. Just give you customers a menu for FFS.

Anyways… Menu is well designed but pretty uninformative. Not being native to Mexico there were loads of fish listed that I have never heard off and that i would have liked to ask the waiter about but the music was just too loud to even consider that. So we muddled through and choose a variety of dishes.

Food service was fairly prompt.

Miso was amazing

Sushi was okay but lacked any real depth or flavour excluding the bluefin tuna sashimi which was delicious but wafer thin strips and only 8 of them. No wasabi or ginger served with the dishes either. Another pet hate. Not that you could taste the difference between the rather bland sushi so I guess no need to refresh your palate.

I boshed three cocktails in about 15 minutes and they were nice, but mostly ice, and not stronger enough.

Had the ambience been better, the vibe more welcoming and the drinks better value I would have drunk my way through the cocktail menu.

As it goes the bill came to about £80 for what was essentially a snack and a few drinks.

As for the music… The beats were decent but very repetitive and more suited to a club night for coke heads than restaurant/bar

All in all, I wouldn’t bust a nut trying to get in here unless you got the cash to splurge, if you do go make sure to get a REAL table and not a coffee table...

We were reluctant to try this place as it is so expensive and we are used to excellent Japanese food at home for very reasonable prices. But we were finally convinced by the good reviews and a personal recommendation. Our experience was nothing like those of the glowing reviews here. I didn’t realize we should have made a reservation for a Wednesday night and when we arrived only seats at the bar were available. The bar seats were very uncomfortable and there was really no place to put my purse. The menu was accessed by QR code. It was nice to have photos and descriptions of menu items but it was very difficult to scroll through the menu. I decided on miso soup, seaweed salad and the salmon donburi and my husband the ramen soup and a roll. The waiter told me they didn’t have salmon, they had tuna which was the same thing. They are definitely not the same and then the waiter went to check and decided they could indeed make it salmon. I felt rushed the whole time…unlike the people who experienced slow service to me it seemed like the waiters were racing to see how fast they could finish serving us. The bartender in front of us was constantly banging the water jug, glasses and even customer’s dishes on the wooden bar. The waiters refused to talk Spanish with me even though in some cases their English was heavily accented and not as good as my Spanish. The cocktail I ordered tasted like some sweet tropical fruit juices mixed with mezcal..certainly nothing special that would justify the extremely high price tag. Our food arrived all at once. We weren’t asked if we wanted dessert which was fine as by this time I didn’t have any desire to prolong the experience. At about 8 pm they started playing loud music which is pretty well standard here in Puerto now but definitely did not add to our enjoyment. This was hands down the worst dining experience we had here and maybe one of the worst ever. Re the restaurant’s response: We have eaten Japanese food around the world for almost 40 years now. II repeat - this was one of our worst dining experiences. However we didn’t have any complaints about the food. It just wasn’t special enough to compensate for all our other complaints. Making reservations is not the norm in Puerto - I didn’t see anything on the Google listing or the Somme website to suggest that reservations...

The food is overall great if you actually get it. Unfortunately it is massively overshadowed by the awful service. Different waiters will occasionally come by to ask what you ordered and if you got it, then the waiter will disappear and maybe a different one will come by 15-20 minutes later, sometimes with food or sometimes clueless. I had the omakase and was pretty disappointed. It was not a true omakase but rather a prix fixe menu. The menu tells you the chef selects his favorites but then it lists what is included. The worst part is that this is just the same price or more as if you order everything individually. My waiter(s) forgot the sake and green tea multiple times so I actually didn't even get the full omakase. He still charged me full price and tried to include a 15% tip. I knew it was a bad sign when I sat down and it took 5 minutes for someone to ask what type of water I wanted, then after 20 more minutes it never came while I saw the waiter flirting with the hostess. Finally I had to flag down a different waiter and was able to ask again for my water and order some food. It's a shame this place is so poorly run because the food is quite good. I heard 3 other tables around me also have issues where something they ordered was forgotten. I highly recommend against ordering the omakase (which is $1200 pesos) if you do decide to come here, and put your entire order in as soon as you can get someone to...