Izakaya DUKI — Restaurant in Rotterdam

Izakaya is a Japanese restaurant with a shared dining concept - you’ve got to choose small dishes and share them with your friends and family. We tried a special aubergine, Ebi wasabi Yuzu shrimps, Takoyaki - fried octopus balls, Karaage - fried chicken, Sirloin steak, and Shougayaki - pork neck. All the dishes mentioned above were quite tasty and good, only shrimp being served unpeeled and a bit hard to eat. The steak was sadly hard to chew and eat as well; not my type of meat altogether. But anything else was delicious - you can never go wrong with fried stuff 😅 We also tried the desserts—Yuzu Crème Brule and Shiro Choco. Crème Brule wasn’t the best, and I feel like it wasn’t worked through being paired with Yuzu. Shiro Choco was much better, on the other hand, although it was a bit sweeter with all the white chocolate. The cocktails menu is also inspired by Japanese cuisine, and I chose Shour Shi with peach and Sour Ni with grapefruit—it was nice to try something different from the regular cocktails we are used to. As for the ambience, it seems authentic, with helpful staff, an open kitchen where you can see dishes being prepared, and a karaoke bar right next to the place. It looks like an excellent addition to Rotterdam’s...

Misleading server that guides customers to over order. My experience: The place is great. I love the setup and decoration. - the food was fine, but I haven’t been wowed. For me, the squid was the best thing on the menu. Many dishes were unfortunately too sweet or too oily for my taste, as well as the octopus of the chef that was served in a overly sweet sauce that we could not even eat. I found the service pretty nice until I realized that we had been purposely mislead to take more dishes. As the concept is ‘to share’ we thought that every dish had smaller portions, which is not the case. We were also rushed in the process to order as ´the kitchen was about to close’. We obviously over ordered not knowing portions and the server had a 100% for sales behavior and 0% for marketing. A bill of over 500€ for 4 people is ridiculous for such a restaurant as this is far from being a Michelin leveled restaurant.

In short: the venue is great, food is average and the service will give you a bad aftertaste as it is nice in your face, but 100% for sales - stay alert out there...

I went for dinner (& Karaoke) with my family. The food, the service and the whole vibe were amazing! I am half Japanese and have lived in Tokyo for 4 years, and this is definitely the best Izakaya-style food I've ever had in Europe. All the dishes brought us back to Japan. They are all very "accurate" (as in, this is exactly what you'd get in an Izakaya in Japan). They even have lemon sours, the go-to drink in Japan!