Sequoia — Restaurant in Madison

Walked in expecting to have a comfortable easy dinner… ordered drinks that looked great, and did taste great. I’d ordered a drink that I’d assumed would come served up and would be pink (read cranberry juice), it came with a cucumber in a tumbler. When I asked the waitress about this discrepancy she seemed just as confused as I was and brought the bar tenders menu for me to check (this matched what was in front of me, not what was on the menu). After ordering drinks we put in a food order pretty quickly, our appetizer came out and then nothing else did for 50 minutes. No waitress checking in on our table to see if we needed anything, not even water refills. Finally she appeared with something that wasn’t what we ordered but the table next to us — who arrived 20 minutes after us and had food, drinks, and service. We ended up needing to flag down the other waitress in our section to check about our food, she got it to us in a minute. When the food arrived it was room temp, and we’d ordered both cold and hot rolls. The UpTown funk roll was easily best of the three, only because it had the least amount of raw ingredients. We had high hopes for the crispy rice and it came out as a day old tater tot in texture with the topping falling off if you looked at it wrong. The salmon avocado was fine, nothing special. New Waitress comped 1 roll and was apologetic, if she’d been our waitress for the evening our experience could have been different. Hindsight, we ordered raw fish and took a risk eating it after it had been sitting out in the kitchen for nearly an hour. We got lucky and had no sickness, but it was a risk.

Long story short: Waitress abandoned us at our table for an hour when our food had probably been ready for 40 minutes. Won’t be returning which is too bad because it’s the only sushi place in the...

Never had a worse experience at a restaurant until I went here. I came here with three of my friends for a nice fun dinner before heading to our homecoming dance. Little did we know we would not eat much there. We ordered our food and waited for probably an hour. Mind you when we got to the restaurant it was nowhere near full. A waiter (not the one who took our order)came to us and gave us one out of the two appetizers we ordered. We devoured that salad because at that point we were hungry. We hadn't eaten since 9 am. Our original waiter does not come to check on us whatsoever. We were left abandoned. We wait for another hour and our original waiter comes to our table. She tells us that she lost our order and had to retake it. First of all, how do you lose 4 people's orders? That's ridiculous. We reorder our food trying to hold in our anger. She told us it would take 30 minutes for it to be done. We wait there for 30 more min and our food is still nowhere to be found and no waiter. Not to mention people who came after us were getting their food and yet ours is nowhere. One of my friends goes up to the front desk and asks if we could have it to-go because at this point we wouldn't have made it to the dance if we were to eat it there. We then wait another 30 min and our food is still not there. Our waiter comes over and says it will take 15 minutes more. At that point, we were done. We got up and paid for the one appetizer we ate (a salad that was split for 4 people) and left. Not to mention they barely put a discount on our appetizers. I do not recommend going here. This was the worst experience. Not to mention I had such high hopes and wanted sushi. Disappointing. Saying sorry doesn't...

I stopped in here on a whim, and in a bit of a rush. It's not the place to go in a bit of a rush. Despite being late in the lunch hour and nearly empty the kitchen was very slow, and their timing was off. I ordered the lunch special, which is a choice of appetizers or salads, and then a choice of ramen bowls. It took almost 20 minutes for the food to come out, and the two items came out together rather than sequentially, so I had a choice of which item I wanted to get cold while I ate the other. The waitress also couldn't answer one of my questions about a menu item. I asked her what is this? She said I don't really know. Then we looked at each other while I waited for her to offer to go ask someone else that works there. She didn't. The upside is the food was very good. The salmon skin salad was very nice, the salmon skin was perfectly cooked, the greens were fresh and tended towards bitter to offset the somewhat sweet dressing. The house ramen was also good - rich pork broth, lots of noodles and vegetables. Only two very this slices of pork, which is a bit stingy for a $14 lunch special, but it was well prepared. Frankly, if I had unlimited time I'd drive to Umami on Williamson - they're ramen is better and their staff know the answers to customer questions (or they know to go get them) but Sequoia wasn't awful and they're new, so they have time to...