AKEMI — Restaurant in Berkeley

I live very nearby all used to eat here with my family often. It’s the only restaurant around us that sells ramen and it’s been decent enough for us to return to it every once in awhile the past few years. However, the last time I ordered takeout from here, I got the veggie ramen and it came with EIGHT small dead flies in it!!! I was absolutely disgusted when I found the first one after I had already eaten about 1/4th of the noodles, but I decided to discard the noodle the fly had touched and keep eating because I didn’t have anything else to eat. Then I found the second fly and I was shocked. I started moving the noodles around a bit to see if there were and more and I found six more. I don’t think I’ve ever been more disgusted in my life. My family was completely appalled as well and they ended up discarding their food because we could no longer trust that any of their food was sanitary after all the dead flies found in mine. This was about three months ago and we have not returned since. I really value the importance of sanitization and cleanliness, so finding all those bugs in my ramen after I had already eaten some of it, was a bit traumatizing because I wasn’t sure if there had been more flies in it that I had accidentally already eaten without noticing. Sorry to say we will not be...

Tldr: food was okay, service sucked

Came on a Thursday evening with reservation, amidst a restaurant of white middle aged couples and families. We had to ask for water from our server, ask for utensils to serve a salad, ask for soy sauce, ask for refills of water/tea, and basically everything. The servers seemed like college students who'd begrudgingly been forced into work. When we asked any question that wasn't immediately straightforward, the servers seemed confused and flustered. We were told we had five minutes to leave the restaurant for closing after being served dessert just moments earlier, which happened after almost fifteen minutes from placing the order. The service was cringey enough to noticeably impact our evening.

That said, food was ok. Got the spinach gomae, salad, warm kale, a couple fish rolls, and yuzu panna cotta. Fish seemed fresh, and tender. The warm kale is actually kale in miso soup which was not what we expected. The miso was also pretty salty. The yuzu panna cotta was quite soft, almost yogurt like in texture, and seemed watery. The flavor was exactly like the honey citron tea.

Would maybe do more rolls or sashimi in the future, but only to-go (pick it up and then eat it right outside the...

We used to come here a lot when we lived nearby, and it was great. Today was our first time back in about four years, and the quality has really gone downhill, although the staff are still solid, although the bussing leaved a lot to be desired. The table was dirty-- there was salmon roe scattered across it.

The food has really gone downhill. My husband had the salmon lover's roll, which he said was serviceable but bland. Then we both had the salmon bento, and it was a shocker. The salmon tasted strongly of plastic, like maybe it had been microwaved in plastic? However it happened, plastic was definitely the dominant flavor. The salmon was sitting in a kind of gloopy, semi-coagulated, very sweet sauce. The Brussels sprouts, which used to be A+, were also covered in that sauce. The miso soup seemed packaged-- miso is very salty, but this was super salty, dominating the flavor of the miso. The genmaicha was weak. The rice was solid, and the staff took the bento boxes off our bill, hence the four stars for service. We were super bummed, as we had been looking forward to the excellent food and service they...