Kaiju Sushi & Spirits — Restaurant in Coeur d'Alene

We ate here quite often and it was always great service, food and atmosphere. We went last night and it was not the same at all. We did find out the owner sold it since we were in last. Let me start with the obvious inexperienced wait staff. My husband ordered his usual vodka martini and they had there hard liquor license pulled, so only beer, wine and sake were available. We ordered a flight of sake, when it was served in the past the server would tell us what each one was, but last night, 4 shot glasses showed up on a board and she just left it there, we were seated in the bar area at a table, and the server said she would line the bottles up on the bar so we would know what we were drinking, seriously, all the labels were facing the opposite direction, then another server is behind the bar looking at the bottles sitting there and wondering why they are there, and proceeds to shake each bottle and looking at them to see if they are empty, which they aren't and puts them away. Crazy. Waitress comes over takes our order, which was, edamame, gyoza, tempura for appetizer, a lge sashimi which comes with a miso soup, and a destroya roll. On the menu for the age Sashimi it says 5 fish, when asked what that meant, 2 of the waitresses said it means 5 pieces, for $35.00? They just gave me the deer in headlights look and walked away. I think we sat for about 45 minutes before any food came, what comez first is our sashimi, then the roll, then the gyoza edamameand tempura came, all were cold and the server never came back to check on us. So very disappointing, our dinner was over $132.00, not worth it at all. As far as the music in there it was screaming and violent not the type of music you want to listen to while eating. Overall, it was just bad. We were very disappointed, and not sure we...

Okay here's the scoop, the food was mostly good. Portions were very skimpy. The beef bowl we told them that they only had three little slices of beef in it the rest was all caramelized onions and so they brought more beef and charged an additional $5 for that. did ask for additional Ginger they brought over a big bowl of Ginger and did not charge for that. The sushi while tasty had very little pieces of fish in it and very little pieces of cream cheese in it. I did get the Philly roll. The chicken wings were fried to the point of difficult to chew on with a tiny tiny bit of the honey mustard miso sauce. Had to ask for more miso sauce took about 12 minutes to get it. the seaweed salad as well as the cucumber salad was excellent and the tempura was tasty although the batter was extremely light. The sauce for the tempura was okay. The jasmine tea was excellent. The service was mostly excellent and very courteous and very happy. Would I come back again I would but it would not be my first choice I would certainly try one of the other sushi places instead. Now keep in mind this is not an expensive place to come to so maybe that explains why the serving portions especially the protein serving portions are so small because they don't charge a whole lot for it and I'm sure being on the Sherman Street it's an expensive place to do business. anyway if you're going to eat here let them know you don't expect little teeny tiny portions especially in the area of the protein. Anyway I'll include a photo so you have an idea of what we got and if you make it big enough you'll see the size of...

I would like to see this place improve with service and food presentation. I don't recommend sitting at the bar for dinner on a Saturday night because the bartender will get busy and will just not be able to get to you when you need something. That's just the situation. Staff were nice enough but maybe they were down a person or two. I hope that's it. The servers were very busy and it was hard to relax with them rushing around acting so frantic and hurried. And we had to interrupt them at their kiosk to get soy sauce, wasabi and ginger and that was a bit awkward and slow but they were nice enough finally.

As for the food, it was OK. The menu listed some interesting rolls. The miso soup was cooler than we preferred. The wakame salad was large and delicious -- the best thing of the night. My roll was served without garnish and looked quite plain on the white platter. A few sprouts or a green onion would have gone pretty far in helping it look like something made with love and care. It was rather dull.

Also -- on the stereo was a fairly cheesy oldies mix, which the 70-somethings beside us enjoyed increasingly with every song while it was becoming less tolerable with us, 3-4 decades separating us. Oh, well. Runaround Sue!

I would prefer to go somewhere else or just not go on a busy night. I think a table of 8 in the other room was throwing things off. But that shouldn't be our problem. If I can get over this bad impression I might go back. I write all these things based on one visit and with the hope they...