Totoro — Restaurant in Ann Arbor

We stopped by here as we had heard it was the "best Sushi in Ann Arbor". We've tried a lot of the sushi in Ann Arbor and wanted to see if this placed lived up to the hype.

We arrived and were seated promptly. We ordered our dishes and found that they took quite a while to arrive, about 30-45 minutes. I understand that it was very busy so I am not too upset about it, however it took about 25 minutes just to get our miso.

For an appetizer, we ordered the takoyaki. For $7.50, we got four small takoyaki with hardly any octopus inside them. They tasted good, but most other places around here give you 6-8 takoyaki for about the same price range. It was disappointing to have the dish brought out after waiting a half hour only to see it was such a small amount.

For our dinner, we ordered the eel tempura roll and the Spider roll, along with a chicken teriyaki bento. The eel tempura roll wasn't bad, but I've definitely had better at other places in A2. The spider roll was WAYY too big. Sushi is all about the perfect bite, and it was hard to fit an entire piece of the Spider roll in your mouth. The large size also meant there was a lot of seaweed in each bite, meaning there was a significant bitterness to each piece. If the pieces were smaller, there wouldn't have been a problem.

The bento was pretty good. The California roll was good (though kinda hard to mess that up lol), and the chicken teriyaki wasn't bad. I would say that the chicken probably needs to be marinated to incorporate the flavor more. Tempura was good as well, and the rest of the bento was satisfactory.

Overall, we probably won't come out of our way to come back to Totoro, but maybe if we were in the area and wanted sushi, we would go, or if we were invited, we would go. Otherwise there are better places in Ann Arbor and the Ypsilanti area. We appreciated the Tonari no Totoro theme, as we are both Ghibli fans, and the staff were very...

If you have Celiac, or a gluten allergy, I would recommend looking for another sushi place. My friends and I have been a loyal customer of Totoro’s for well over three years, but after a recent experience we will not be back. We placed an order for carry out, making it very explicit that a member of our party has Celiac and that it’s very important that no cross contamination should occur. However, when we picked up the food, we realized that the soy sauce packed in the designated gluten free order contained gluten. There was also soy sauce on the rolls themselves, although we did not realize it also contained gluten at the time. My friend was out of commission for the rest of the night and well into the next day, due to the high gluten content in the meal (mind you, she didn’t even eat the whole thing, realizing right away that the order was wrong). When we contacted Totoro about this, we were quite literally argued with about my friend’s allergic reaction, being told that there was no way any cross contamination occurred as everyone is trained in allergen and food safety. When we pointed out that there was GLUTEN soy sauce in the designated GLUTEN FREE meal, we were told any cross contamination that occurred was our fault, as if it is not the first rule of proper food safety to make sure that there is no gluten near a gf meal. I am incredibly disappointed and frustrated with Totoro’s blatant disregard for their customers’ health. My friends and I will be looking for a new sushi restaurant that takes dietary...

As a UoM student Totoro has been one of my goto Japanese restaurants in Ann Arbor. But I will never come back because of a recent experience and the terrible service we received. The server first seated me and my gf to a small table which barely even had space for us to sit in and put our stuff. Whereas we noticed that the server had been seating multiple parties of twos who looked White to the side of the room with spacious tables with four seats, while seating multiple Asian parties of twos to small tables back to back on the other side of the room. We weren’t comfortable with the pattern and felt disrespected because of the stereotype that we are Asian, Asian people are more “stingy” with tips therefore only deserve to sit on smaller tables even though there are so many open spaces on the other side of the room. Thus we left a minimum tip and when we were about to leave, the server pretend to collect the plates but actually to check the amount of tip we left. (Note that she did not check the prestigious customers sitting at the spacious tables’ tip amount before they left.) She tried to “mansplain” to us that in the US you have to give at least 15% tip, or you are not allowed to come back again. It’s such a frustrating experience. Please have more respect for your customers. Even though we are Asian we know how things work in the US without you telling us. Tips should be earned, not seen...