UCHI — Restaurant in London

Uchi is in my neighbourhood and heralded as good Japanese so I was looking forward to trying the food here. Unfortunately for myself and my date whom I was trying to impress, it dominated the discourse for the entirety of our experience. The subject and the nature of our conversation were wholly negative- Uchi’s awful front of house management and unfinished decor being the amuse bouche of our evening, we chewed on these topics for 30 mins until the server(s) came to collect our menu selection card, this happened only after I began to wave it in the air, auctioning it off to the nearest employee, losing much of my dignity in the process. When the server did finally collect the card, he took it wordlessly and shortly, without giving me an opportunity to ask questions about the sake selection.

I suggested walking away at this point and ordering deliveroo but my date and I agreed that we had already invested close to an hour(we had booked a table for 8 but didn’t get seated until 8:10) and I agreed with her. So we stayed for the theatre that was to unfold.

Our first plates came after 1 full hour, as they were ready from the kitchen. We remained confused and hungry as we weren’t impressed by the £4 “pickled” carrots. The walnut and avocado salad with miso dressing, while scoring in presentation was well under seasoned.

The drinks we ordered from the menu card came with our second and third course of dishes and only after we inquired about them. Curious to know if we would have received them at all had we not chased for them but not curious to know if they would have added them to our bill anyways, as this is exactly what happened to two of our other courses that we failed to prod them for.

At exactly 10pm, in tow with government guidelines, we were brought the bill(including missed items) and told that the restaurant was closed. I informed them that we still had food coming and it was an error on their part not to give us the opportunity to order dessert, and that a 2 hour sitting should have allowed for this.

The server apologized and tried to bring our last dishes, only one of which managed to make it to the table, after the restaurant was supposedly closed. We refused the dish and asked it and the others to be removed from the bill and she obliged but I sensed it was an issue as she tried to push us to take it to-go.

I will say that while the dishes we did receive were harder to fault, our time spent there was a waste of 2 hours and £100. Clearly their management needs a...

Read the bad reviews: the same issues keep coming up and clearly management doesn’t care to do anything to fix them. There are plenty of authentic, appropriately priced sushi places in London and no reason whatsoever to choose this one.

Called up in advance for an early dinner and was told to just walk in with my date, upon arriving was asked if I had a reservation, to which I explained this and was told to wait and given a very specific table I could not change in a very empty restaurant that did not fill up during our mealtime.

The experience only got worse- very overpriced and extremely limited sushi menu, slow service and receiving wrong items and generally not a friendly vibe towards us as a young gay couple. We ordered hot sake which did not arrive by the time our last dish was finished, so I asked the waitress to cancel it so we could pay our bill and leave, a few minutes later the sake arrived - lukewarm - from who I believe is the chef who served it to us and would not allow us to return it because she ‘already heated it up’. I did not want to argue as the whole experience was already very uncomfortable and I just wanted to leave. The markup on the price of what was very average, very lukewarm sake was also totally predatory as were the general prices.

Bathroom is a disaster, and although it was early evening and coffee staff had arrived, thy refused to make us a coffee as it ‘wasn't ready’ and did not accommodate us when we said we would wait for one. Staff seem very inconvenienced by people trying to have a meal at their establishment. I don’t like leaving bad reviews but it was genuinely very difficult to have a nice time here and with the exception of the black cod the food is definitely nothing special . We ended up paying the most I have ever paid for sushi in london for a few pieces of basic tuna and salmon nigiri, lukewarm sake and a side of homophobia.

Happy to take this down for an apology and refund...

The food that came out was very, very good. However, the problem was the ordering system and service; its total chaos and many people around us were experiencing the same issues.

The menu is tick what you want, but it seems like for this restaurant that system simply does not work. Especially when the menu suggests that ticking one item will be “2pcs”, but then you end up getting one piece, or then ticking twice for other “2pcs” items, and end up getting 4! So it seems like some of the staff can interpret the menu differently, and in the rush of a busy restaurant, some ticks on our menu got missed entirely which means we had drinks not ever turning up, or main courses not turning up at all.

We ticked all the items we wanted, but we had double the amount of some things turning up, half of the amount of some things turning up, and also a lot of items simply not turning up at all! There is no order to which anything arrives, we received some mains before starters, which I am not totally opposed to as it’s all coming out fresh, but it took almost exactly an hour for our first drinks order to arrive! We ended up getting our drinks when we were about to order dessert, so not an ideal experience. And we had to ask 4 times before our drinks actually arrived, despite being told twice “your drink is the next one to be made”, whilst we then watched other drinks getting made.

The restaurant itself it’s decorated very nicely, however for a date night for two on valentines, we were quite literally sat on a table for 4 with another couple, which was a bit strange!

All in all, we had been very excited to try UCHI, but left feeling a little disappointed. The food is great, but the meal and atmosphere is just tainted by chaotic service and...