Liki Asian Bistro & Bar — Restaurant in Avon

12/09/24 - A shumai and yellowtail sashimi app, Sunset Boulevard signature roll (spicy tuna, salmon, yellowtail, avocado w/plum sauce), and the Happy Four Season - beef, chicken, scallops & shrimp w/mixed vegetables perfect, as always.

10/08/24 - Special occasion. Two roll lunches with spicy tuna, spicy yellowtail and shrimp tempura.

5/24 - Still remarkable service and food.

8/31/23: We love lunch here. Two of us ordered the 2 roll option with spicy tuna, spicy yellowtail and eel/avocado and one the salmon box. All came with a choice of soup & salad.

1/23: Tasty rock shrimp, gyoza, sushi, sashimi, hand roll and cooked shellfish main.

8/22: Always scrumptious.

Liki lunches are always delicious & nutritious. Hot green tea, sake, wonton soup with salad and ginger dressing, a teriyaki salmon box and 3 sushi rolls. I like the slivers of ginger. Their wasabi has a good burn.

For kicks, we tried the Scorpion drink for two. Nice presentation. Moderate alcohol despite the list. The Rock Shrimp App was so good order it for dinner.

Fine meal Feb '22. Arigatou! Sake and wonton soup nice & hot; fried pork gyoza, scallion pancakes & yellowtail sashimi all perfect; Seafood combo main, Avon Roll, Liki King Roll and Unagi were fine.

Sat at the bar this visit. Ordered 3 apps & 2 special cocktails from their blackboard. Drinks were great. Shrimp tempura was very good. Steamed gyoza. Curious if Japanese cuisine made a different version of calamari than Italian, we tried it. Very crunchy with a deep fried panko crust. It's good, but we prefer the traditional version.

Late Nov. lunch brought two teriyaki lunch boxes with salmon and shrimp. Salads and wonton soup still very good. The tea was hot this time, but the sake can use more heat. White rice was dry, cool and flavorless, so my partner mixed it into his brown rice upgrade which was warm and moist. Service is polite & efficient.

Exceptional lunch late Oct. I mean to have sit down lunches more often in Asian restaurants, instead of only dinner or picking up take-out. Liki gave us a noteworthy meal that included our choice of soup & a crisp salad with dressing that reminded me of Benihana's. The Wonton soup has delicate wrappings on the pork and a warm broth.

I had 3 signature rolls: shrimp tempura, spicy tuna & eel avocado. All delicious. My partner chose a Lunch Box Special that comes with 3 shumai, a California roll, salad & rice. The Salmon Teriyaki Box had a lovely portion of fish with some cooked broccoli & carrots, shumai and a CA roll. The only flaw: the hot tea needs to be served hot.

As someone who used to eat sushi for many years in CA, and since Murasaki/Sakimura closed in Simsbury, I'm happy to find another good sushi restaurant in the area. Our table of three had two diners who ate raw fish and one who did not, but since Liki like most sushi places offers both cooked and raw fish, and other cuisine, we ordered a variety of items.

Our meal included one yellowtail sushi, two spicy tuna hand rolls, a spider roll, shrimp tempura roll, pan fried pork dumplings, Thai veg mini rolls, one miso and wonton soup, a salad and two entrées. Two of us shared the triple sashimi 15 pc platter of the Chef's daily selection with salmon, yellowtail & tuna. One had the seafood combo of lobster, scallop, crab, shrimp & vegetables with brown rice.

We ordered 2 pcs of Unagi for a traditional finish, but our waitress brought only one saying the Chef only makes one at a time. We split the one served. Everything was well prepared, fresh and a pleasure to eat. Miso soup is different on the west coast, so I'm getting used to the gold broth here.

Liki has a well stocked bar. We tried the "Cucumber Smash," and "Liki Lemonade" with strawberries, lemonade & simple syrup but substituted Brockmans gin for vodka. Both were pretty and flavorful but my partner couldn't taste any gin. Ordering a 2nd, they were out of strawberries. I said see if it's the strawberries masking the gin or a light pour. It was the latter. I'll stick with sake. A small hot carafe...

I want to start by saying that I don't leave many poor reviews. But through this review, I'm hoping to provide some constructive criticism on our recent experience at Liki.

My mom and I ate here last week and we did not have a good experience. Let's start with the food. I got a salmon entree that was slightly undercooked (I would say that people have different takes on the doneness of their fish, but one of my pieces of salmon was cooked more than the other), and she received a seafood combo that was plain. Our waitress did in fact inform my mother that the entree was seasoned mostly with just some "flour and water" mixture, which we didn't understand, but she still continued to recommend it. So she figured why not, so she ordered it. Now I don't have a problem if this is a dish of choice for some, but we would've preferred a description more along the lines of "this seafood dish in particular doesn't come with any strong flavor, so if that's not what you're looking for then I'd look for something else." The end product was just very bland. We also ordered hibachi styled fried rice, as an entree to split between the two of us. We expected all 3 entrees to come out at the same time, in order to enjoy all of the different flavors at once - but the rice was brought out around 10-15 minutes after our two entrees were brought out, so we had already finished the other entrees. Not only did this take awhile, but when asking our server multiple times, she would "check on it" and then would be uncommunicative about the actual status of the said dish. Once the rice finally came out, it tasted bland. Now this could be chalked up to this specific restaurant's preferences, but I can say for certain that it was unusually bland, because I've ordered the same dish from this restaurant before, and it tasted much more exciting, and frankly, delicious. We then expressed this experience to our waitress, not looking for a refund, but to inform in order to make improvements in the future. We were not greeted with a "Sorry to hear about that, I'll let the kitchen know", but a "that's how it's supposed to taste!" and then we continued to explain that we had had the same dish at this restaurant previously, to which our waitress replied "we have a new chef." And that was it.

I am not looking to 'expose' our waitress, or try to ruin Liki's reputation. Both my and my mom have always enjoyed this restaurant, but with our recent experience, I felt inclined to say something. Please take my...

I do very badly want to give this place 5 stars. So many positives: fish is fresh, attention to detail is excellent, kitchen output is consistent (I’ve eaten here at least 15 times), and most surprising: the non-sushi options are phenomenal for a sushi place.

Normally, either the sushi is good and rest of the food is bad, or rest of the food is great and sushi is marginal. Not here. Udon noodles are INSANE! So are the general tsos and other Asian entrees.

Critiques: take out is definitely inferior to dine in, even for non-sushi apps / entrees. Also, the quality of some of the sushi prep can vary based on who prepares your food. The head sushi chef is incredible. He is precise, sweats the details, and is very skilled. His other sous chefs on the other hand… I’ve had some mixed results. Don’t get me wrong, they are still good, but not consistent. I had a hand roll once that only had rice on half the seaweed, so you’re left with this hard, odd to eat empty seaweed cone at the end of the hand roll.

I will continue to frequent this place on the regular. Amazing sushi considering...