HARU Japanese Restaurant — Restaurant in Palmerston North

What an amazing place. For 50$ I had the chefs recommendation. Which had all their signature dishes.. and pretty filling too. Much better than YATAI at Featherston st. Highly recommended. And amazing service..

The dessert was ok creme brûlée. Included in the meal but prolly skip dessert if u r going for Ala Carte..

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Visited again sept 2021.

Great food. Worth the money spent. This time has prawns and mushroom balls for entree. And other dishes that I have forgotten name. Definitely worth visiting..

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Visited again Nov 2023 :: post Covid

Food items have certainly become more expensive but that is true for any restaurant. However the quality has certainly slipped and is not what it was pre Covid. Which I can also understand. However the service has also dipped!!! Which I cannot understand.. We paid 50$/ head for 4 people without any drinks.

Sushi, 18$/head for 6 pieces : good and certainly worth it. (X3) Takoyaki - octopus 16$ and very nice squid. 20$ not worth it if you ask me. sizzling salmon 31$, nothing special. I’d avoid. It didn’t even come out sizzling!!! Salmon steak 39$ also worthy tempura platter 40$ (not worth it to be honest)

Overall...

Waited an hour for our food and the service was far from perfect. We had waitresses hovering over our table the whole time waiting to snatch up plates seconds after eating the last piece of food off the plate it was served on. We felt very rushed and at one point the lady seen me finish off another piece of food and rushed over and grabbed my plate and asked if I was finished but I had a mouth full of food and was given no time to respond where she ran off with half of my food. They continued to come back every 2-3 minutes once again hovering and waiting for plates to clear. My partner and I wanted to go out for a nice meal after a busy week but felt like we had to grip onto our plates for dear life. At one point the waitress came back AGAIN and started clearing the table all because I put my chopsticks down for a minute to reply to a text where my food was taken once again. I understand it is their job but there is no need to come over repeatedly waiting to clear plates, just wait until people are done eating or better yet have paid and left…. We were looking forward to some desert but were basically rushed out the restaurant so didn’t bother. Definitely...

We were first customers through the door upon opening. When asked if we had made a reservation, which we had not, the host in the hanbok(?) seemed greatly inconvenienced.

As we were speaking she interrupted me mid sentence “I need to see the customers who made a reservation” running off to two others who walked through the doors. We were seated first but the menus and orders were taken from the reservations that arrived after.

The food is slightly above average for a rural NZ town - but by no means anything spectacular. The tempura batter is far too thick, agedofu was not fresh and the norimaki rice was crunchy meaning it was not fresh either.

If you don’t like walk ins, you must communicate that with signage or the like. From previous reviews I can see this isn’t the first time this has happened and you haven’t rectified it. What could’ve been a nice meal was made very disappointing from the beginning exclusively due to...