sakura — Restaurant in England

I frequented this restaurant with my friends on a Tuesday evening. The restaurant was not busy - only our table and one other. We unfortunately had a disappointing experience. We took a while to choose what to order as the menu is vast but traditional sushi is not served on the menu (such as a California roll etc). We made our choice and ordered our food but sadly had to wait ages for the food to arrive. None of our food arrived together , with a period of at least 45 minutes between each dish arriving. This made it really hard to eat together as the hot food we had ordered would get cold if we waited. We also had issues with the food we ordered. Ingredients that were not stated on the menu started to appear in each of our dishes. For example, I had ordered sushi with salmon , avocado and crab but I also got prawns put into this sushi. When I asked what the sushi was and why it had prawns , the waitress said she didn’t know. She went to ask the chef who was by the bar preparing the sushi and so it was very awkward being able to hear their whole conversation whilst they spoke about us. This sushi was not meant to have prawns but they didn’t seem to do anything about it. Next my friend received her sushi and it was coated in crunchy sugar. She can not eat sugar and didn’t realise it was coated in it until she ate some. Again, this was not stated on the menu that it was an ingredient. When we told them that she can’t eat sugar, they then gave her a mochi, which was kind, but again highlighted that they didn’t comprehend what we were saying. This is a big WARNING for people with allergies as there were different ingredients put into our meal that were NOT stated on the menu. Please be careful...

An extremely poor experience overall.

4 of us arrived on a quiet Saturday afternoon for lunch and a drink. After our order being taken, only some drinks arrived and we had to chase up the rest of the drinks.

One starter came out shortly. Twenty minutes later, two mains came out with the waitress telling us "another main will come later". After an hour of waiting, two people at the table had not had any of their food arrive and we were still missing around four other dishes. We asked where our food was, at which point the owner then ran to find the chef who had gone on break then came back to advise us our orders has gone missing, nothing had been prepared and that nothing more was coming. We had been at the restaurant for around two hours at this point and had not eaten anything.

We were then asked to pay for the single drink we had each whilst we were waiting for our food and the two mains that had arrived. The card machine didn't work, so we were asked to sit there and bank transfer the owner individually. As I complained, we were given £10 off the bill.

Unbelievably disappointing, awful customer experience and really poor to make us sit there and transfer you £2 for a can of coke when we hadn't even been given food. Will not...

Lovely food, polite but sketchy service. Comfortable and spacious seating, located right in the heart of Leicester.

Food comes out when it’s ready, so best to just order the dishes you want next if you want to structure your meal with courses. (We asked for some dishes as starters and the rest later as mains but they just turned up in random order anyway 🙄)

First to arrive was prawn fried noodles which were very good and a decent portion.

I had a mixed platter of sashimi and nigiri and it was excellent. Mackerel was lightly cured. Tuna and salmon were fresh and high quality.

I had a jar of warm sake with my meal, and the hot water was swapped out regularly which was good service.

Overall...