Kisaki Japanese Cuisine — Restaurant in Manchester

I’m not writing this to be a jerk, I’m offering constructive criticism as a person who has been a server at two restaurants, one of which was a Japanese restaurant. I want your business to succeed and there are some issues you NEED to address immediately for that to happen. -When the hostess sits down a couple at a table set for three, she should remove the 3rd place setting immediately. The 3rd setting sat on our table the whole meal. -A customer’s drink glass should never be fully empty. Keep an eye on your customers and when their drink is getting low ask them if they want another round. This is where restaurants and serves make money. My boyfriend and I were prepared to buy two or three rounds of drinks but nobody checked on us. -Give everyone water unless they specifically say they don’t want water, and keep an eye on their glasses to make sure they never get totally empty. You can fill a table’s water glasses even if it’s not your table. Every customer is everyone’s responsibility, not just one server’s. -Tables should be bussed throughout the meal. We got some small plate appetizers and placed those plates at the corer of the table along with out chop stick wrappers to be picked up when we were done. Nobody ever picked them up. A customer is everyone’s responsibility. So, if anyone sees a table with an empty plate on it, even if it’s not your table, clear the empty plate. -Timing. Your servers have GOT to increase their speed. We didn’t get our dinner until we’d been waiting for an hour, and the restaurant was not busy, and we only got it because we complained. After we had been seated for 50 minutes we flagged down the hostess and asked where our food was, and she brought us a plate that we had seen sitting on the sushi counter for 25 minutes. This is another case of every customer is everyone’s responsibility. Obviously, our server should not have forgotten about us, but when they did, the sushi chef should have said something to somebody after no one had taken the plate after 5 minutes. Your product is raw fish for god’s sake. -Both of us made direct eye contact with both servers many times and neither of them came over to see what we needed. It felt like they were ignoring us on purpose. Unbelievable. -We had planned to order two or three plates of sushi but since the first one took so long we didn’t order anything new because we didn’t want to wait another hour for more food. So, we left, feeling like we didn’t get our money’s worth since we had ordered the all you can eat menu. The night was just really disappointing. -A server tried to give us someone else’s food TWICE. That was the most bizarre gaffe of the evening. If you don’t have a system that keeps track of which table ordered what food, I don’t know how your restaurant business will survive. This was the moment I stopped giving you guys the benefit of the doubt. Up until that moment I thought, oh maybe they are just having an off night. Nope. Trying to give someone somebody else’s food twice is totally unacceptable. -The hostess was kind and gave us our drinks for free which we really appreciated. That made us feel less like we wasted money. Buy guys, get it together. This was my second time in and the service was worse the second time and it wasn’t very good the first time. You have good food, a nice place, a friendly hostess. I want you to succeed. I want a sushi place on Elm street. But I’m not wasting my time or money on place with abysmal and slow customer service. Good luck in the future and I hope you sort...

It was so stupid to tell the customers that we had surveillance to watch you eating his food. Yesterday, we drove 43mi to come to the restaurant. My husband, as usual ordered all-you-can-eat (about 6-8 dishes )for $32, and I ordered, a big eight-roll and a small 6-pieces vegetable roll. It was late to bring my food to me and I picked piece of his salad into my mouth. The girl came to me asking not to eat his food. You couldn’t eat his all-you-can-eat meal, she told me. Okay, bring my food to me, I replied. She kept bringing his little dishes to him but no my food. I was very hungry after a day work, instead seeing people eating in front of you. I could help picking some noodles to satisfying my stomach. Waiting…finally my meal came. My husband invited me to have some noodles (just a couple of it), in swap I picked some of.my lobster to him. The girl came to our table, told me at other customer’s presence that I had been under watching for eating his food. Worsen she said that I was told that you did it last time. Wow! It was so humiliated, wasn’t it. I shocked and talked to her. Yes, we did last time just for fun (probably early this month). I ordered my meal, enough for me (usually 8-big-roll and a dish of salad) and he had his all-you-can-eat. I wasn’t indented to cheat you by a small order for one track mind to eating his, including the tips was about $80 dollars. We came to dine approx. 1.5 - 2times /month since we discovered you in February this year. Each bill proportionally around $78 dollars. We considered it was a happy place for spending some time and put it on our favorite lists of the restaurants in Manchester. Now you told me that I have been under your watching. Nipping some pieces off his stuff became a big crime, weren’t you crazy?? Surely, I did feel goosebump to hear it. Didn’t you have little respect to us?? Such harsh Chinese way in the Chinese restaurant experience for me is normal, but unbelievable happened in the US. Don’t they know what protocol adopt to treat people properly? Don’t they know of the American culture of being kind to others? It looks like they have not. I wish some of them would have come to me and talked the issue in private which would grasp my attention, but they were too clumsy to handle it. Whatever, my family will never go back to the restaurant due it has become a bad...

Manchester is a depressed city so I understand that it may be difficult to keep a restaurant like this afloat. On the outside it appears to be upscale, but this is casual dining. It's another inhospitable, massive, cold, hard, modern american-style, Japanese (with some fusion) restaurant. You're a nuisance just being there and you can't eat and pay the bill fast enough.

I strongly prefer a rustic, humble, homey hole-in-the-wall type Japanese restaurant, but they're hard to find. Americans want big and fancy so these restaurants that mimic the vastness of say, Longhorn Steakouse, they're here to stay.

I was definitely disappointed. I always gauge a place by its chirashizushi. The wait staff refused my ask to have my meal arranged traditionally in a bowl. (These modern style restaurants use huge flat plates for the chirashi which is so bizarre to me, as this is a rice dish. Katsu don, ten don, sake don and unagi don, don't (shouldn't) come on a plate.

The food was decent, and I ate everything, but the presentation was awkward; some assembly required. There was a bowl of rice, fortunately. The pile of sashimi only featured 4 different -not amazing cuts of- fish and some shredded cucumbers. No tamago, no oshinko, no radish, no tako, no nothing special/classic for $25. It was like ordering a $25 burger and getting a patty with only a slice of cheese, and then the buns on the other side of the plate.

Some other notes... there was a large family with screaming children, the edamame were overcooked and unsalted, and I had to awkwardly get up, and ask one of the sushi chefs for a soy sauce dish as I wasn't offered one, and the waitstaff spoke loudly beside me while on their phones. It just wasn't "pleasant" and for $50 a person, comfortable and hospitable is a minimum. Best to just make it at...