Kintaro Japanese Restaurant — Restaurant in Kauai

I personally love Japnese food and it is one of my first choices when it comes to choosing restaurants. Nonetheless, this restaurant ruined my appetite for Japanese food for this month.

One of the important aspect of all Japanese food, is the rice. They need to be properly seasonsed which provides base for rolls, nigiris and so much more. However, this restaurant decided to get rid of the flavor of the rice, and add in more rice than needed which destoryed the complexity of the flavors into one, bland, tasteless thing. I cant describe how dissapointing it was. Everything collapsed especially chirashi and rolls which is supposed to have combination of flavors and textures of ingrediantes complementing each other. Rolls depend on the proportional amount of each ingrediant to the other because it needs to condense all flavors into one bite. Yet, the restaurant stuffed in ingrediants, forgetting about the amount. This lead to one ingrediant's flavor engulfing the others. I ordered basic rolls such as california rolls which sometimes act as base for many complicated rolls. Since they destoryed the simple rolls, I can't imagine how disastrous the others will be. The california rolls in Safeway is better than this. I will not even go on about how soggy the tempuras were. However, for services, it was poor but I will give some benefit of the doubt since there were few huge parties.

Overall, I am quite suprised that this place have 3.8 ratings. The food especially basics were terrible. Chefs lack skills that needs to develop better quality and thoughtful dishes. I will definitely not go to this place nor I will recommend this place to anyone. Please don't waste your...

This rating primarily covers the Teppanyaki side of the restaurant. We had a few of the main menu appetizers and to their credit, those were pretty good. However, the whole Teppanyaki experience was simply subpar.

To start, the waitress mixed up our group’s entree orders as well as the count of how many people would like fried rice. So that broke up the flow of the experience and we had to wait longer for them to swap out the ingredients. The vegetable starter was pretty bland and soggy coming off the grill, while the fried rice was incredibly salty. The teriyaki steak and shrimp entrees tasted fine, but the teriyaki chicken was abysmal. It’s mostly bell pepper and onion, and the chicken that was in there was tough and incredibly flavorless.

The experience was also unremarkable when it comes to the actual Teppanyaki showmanship. The only trick that our chef did was the classic onion volcano. No tricks with the egg or even the shrimp. Pretty disappointing. On top of this, our chef didn’t really talk much and wasn’t as engaging or entertaining as Teppanyaki chefs I’ve experienced in the past.

Overall, I’d say to avoid the Teppanyaki side of the restaurant. It seems people have good things to say about the main menu, so next time I come here I’ll be ordering off of that menu and I suggest you...

My family and I received a recommendation from a local friend to this restaurant. We made a reservation, waited 40 minutes after our reservation time to be seated. Wait service was inattentive. It took 20 minutes to get a few forks to the table. We asked to substitute a seafood for poultry on one entree and asked if there could be a combination of proteins for another entree. That lead to being served and charged for two extra entrees, four entrees for two people? Apparently they did not have a busser, so our table was full of empty plates and bowls. At the end of our meal, it took 20+ minutes to get our checks. One check wasn’t totaled up, as they are hand written. One check was paid for with cash, and the server did not return the change. Another staff member had to be asked for the change, as the server avoided our table after we asked about the charges for two extra meals. It took another 20 minutes for that individual to figure out what happened to our change, and the server still did not come to the table to apologize. I have worked hospitality/restaurant for many years. I’ve never taken time to write a review, or complain to a manager. I’ve never been so disappointed and upset with a restaurant. I do not recommend anyone visit...