TAIKO — Restaurant in Amsterdam

Just to come clear my wife and I have eaten a quite a few Michelin star restaurants and hope we understand what good food service mean (even if the food is not to our like we can appreciate refined tastes). I will try to tell the story as it happened. To start with our booking was for 21:30 but we had to wait until 22:15 (not less) for a table to be available. When we sat down (still in a very good mood) the waiter told us that this is the best asian fusion restaurant in Amsterdam which I found a bit odd. Then the waiter tried to gently force us to get the set 4 course menu (85€) or 8 course menu (115€) saying that it's better if we don't look at the a-la-carte menu "not to ruin the surprise". We then decided to try a few dishes. The Shabu Shabu vegetables for 13€ which tasted like simple raw veg. Nothing special or refined with the vegetables or the side sauces it came with. My wife is pregnant so we asked not to have raw fish or misu soup. The waiter (another one) proposed us some dishes that included these and we had to explain again that these dishes can't be eaten. Another couple that was with us ordered a two shushi salmon rolls and these come with a touch or misu paste on top. The waiter decided on his own to serve one without the misu paste so that my pregnant wife can have some. Clearly he didn't get the point of raw fish and we asked for the dish to be returned and served as ordered. The Wonton soup was really tasteless, the dumplings we OK, and after 3 of us tasting it we had to return it. other dishes were fine but nothing exceptional that me us feel like it's made by a great chef. All in all it seems like this restaurant is not for food lovers but for people that like to spend money on things that look prestigious. with bad service, medium food and very high prices it's one of the worst experiences...

Great, even excellent food, but shaky service and a cramped dining room. There were a whole crew of wait staff, and the primary waiter for our table was excellent. The rest were not always polished in their presentation.

We went for the 8 course omakase menu with sake pairing and actually ended up wishing we would have taken the wine pairing. That's totally down to me discovering that I like wine better than sake. One or two glasses of sake would have been fun but I'm not attuned enough to the nuances to get into it for a long meal. Live and learn.

Kitchen was slow and not really coordinated with the drinks service. The table next to us even complained that they had been waiting a very long time between courses.

Atmosphere is gorgeous, as you would expect from the location. You're given time to soak up the atmosphere, our meal was four hours from coat check to paying the check. We didn't really mind but it did become a bit noticeable towards the end.

Tables are so close that servers have to squeeze. There is not very much privacy. Doesn't feel premium.

Could have done without the random live Japanese drumming.

Biggest fail was the fortune cookies at the end. They had a terrible taste, like burnt paper. Unfortunately you then literally go out the door with a bad taste in your mouth.

It's really delicious food, many dishes wonderfully innovative. Very glad to have eaten here and had the experience. But if going for a dinner at €250 per person, next time I will probably look at some of the other excellent...

Used to be nice, now pretentious, mediocre taste, wildly expensive, tiny portions, poor service, and nothing really positive to go for it.

Been here a few times, mostly nice experiences years ago. This time decided to go all out on a birthday dinner, spent 350 euro for 2 persons on the limited chef menu, and had a severely mediocre experience. The local snack bar would have been better, more romantic, and more fun. We even left hungry, it was just tidbits of food with pomp, and little substance. Some of the dishes were odd taste experiences, but with fish that wasn't very fresh, some bad flavor combos, and none were great. High end restaurants serve small dishes, fine, but this is taking the limit. We were also in the middle of a high traffic zone, no privacy, couldn't talk until demanded to be placed elsewhere, and then either bothered every 3 minutes by staff pushing more extravagantly expensive drinks (11 euro for a glass of mediocre Malbec, yup), or 30 minutes of no attention at all, waiting endlessly on the next round of unappealing dishes. Vegetarian foie grass? Tastes like salt paste, not consumable. Sour thai soup, but just one spoonful... come on! Not coming back anymore. Was way too expensive for what we got, neither of us enjoyed any part of it, with bad service to boot....