Zen Japanese Food Fast — Restaurant in Austin

Update as follows:

Came by because last time,the meals we had were good. However today we left disappointed. We ordered a wagyu burger, fries & build your own bowl (chicken, Buddha veggies with vermicelli & Szechuan sauce).

The fries came out first, then the runner brought out dish after dish, walking around trying to match with a person (they weren’t calling out orders either?

Once the burger arrived, I dug in & noticed there wasn’t much chicken in my bowl, the meal was not spicy at all but salty with not much flavor. However, I did noticed udon noodles mixed in the bowl which was weird. I was sad there was no spice so I thought maybe they mixed the wrong sauce in? I went to the counter & asked for a side of the Szechuan and turns out the sauce in my bowl was correct, there is just no Szechuan peppercorn used in the sauce. Also, the chicken was rubbery & it was nothing but end bits.

Later I told the counter guy my dish had different noodles mixed in and he just smiled and basically said ok, sorry about that but made no attempt to try and fix it.

My bf ordered the burger and it had a lot of big pieces of lettuce in it, he said it was ok but that it was “missing a little bit of that necessary grease.”

Maybe we went on an off day or the regular staff took a day off Idk, but it seems like some reorganization and fine tuning is in order, maybe even a revamp of the menu. 🫤

Original review below:

We got a wagyu burger (not pictured) and the chicken katsu sandwich. They were delicious and freshly made. We’ll definitely be going back to try...

I used to come here all the time. I swear I was one of their biggest customers. I’d eat there twice a day, 4-5 times a week. But then they closed down their Guadalupe location, and I still ate frequently at their Burnet location. Recently, I’ve started to eat less and less. They used to have Chow Now, which was a very simple UX to order with. They switched over to Ordering App which has a jumbled UX, forces you to enter in your credit card information each time, and charges you an extra cost to use. So I started calling and but now their phone line doesn’t even work. These barriers have been enough for me to start going to other places. Ordering take out was key for me because of my schedule. Now I’m on to other places like Chipotle located nearby. I love the food here. The recent price increases are annoying, but reasonable. I love the it’s healthy. There was a time when I could not speak higher about this place, but it’s starting to drift too far from being an excellent experience. What’s sad is that it’s the small details in their business, not the core offering: amazing Japanese-inspired, locally sourced, moderately priced, healthy food. I would have added convenient, but that is now...

We were in an area that we don't go to very often so we pulled up Google to find somewhere to eat. I'm not sure why, but we thought this place was going to have sushi. The menu was all over the place with burgers, salmon sandwiches, cones, bowls.. I was overwhelmed when looking at the menu so I asked the counter service person what they liked. He mentioned two dishes so we picked those two. I think one was called a school girl bowl and the other was some kind of almond chicken. The service was great, and the place seemed like it had a fun vibe. It was also pretty busy inside. We got the food and had a couple bites. Both of our dishes had chicken which had a rubber consistency. The texture was very odd and had us both feeling the need to gag. I'm usually not a very picky eater and can lower my standards and eat just about anything, but both of these dishes were inedible. Even the rice was bad. My white rice was like mush. We picked at some of the veggies in the bowl and dumped the rest. My almond chicken dish only had one almond. Maybe the almond was supposed to be in the batter for the chicken but I...