BLK MKT Eats — Restaurant in Maplewood

The food was absolutely terrible. I am not a very picky eater (besides being vegetarian); most of the time I'm just eating for sustenance and don't care that much about the taste so I rarely have complaints about the taste of the food. I don't remember the last time I ate something that tasted this bad... The burrito I ordered was a mash up of a bunch of ingredients due to the restaurant being a fusion style cuisine; the problem though was that none of the flavors or textures complimented each other and it was just a bunch of conflicting tastes in my mouth. I think they are aware of this since they tried to drown out all of the other flavors with excessive amounts of sauce. Not only was the taste bad, it was extremely difficult to eat - the burrito required me to unwrap the entire thing before being able to eat it rather than it being wrapped from the end so I could unwrap it as I ate. This difficulty eating was made worse by the fact that the guy making my burrito didn't even fully get the seaweed/rice wrap around the insides so a lot of things spilled out as I unwrapped the paper. It was very trying finishing the first half of the burrito and even though I was still very hungry after eating it, I struggled to muster the willpower to start the second half. I ended up giving up and having to throw it away three bites into it. On a minor note, it was also very disappointing to see that when my burrito was being prepared, there was fish and imitation krab that had fallen into the shiitake mushrooms (this is a minor issue for me, but there are people with seafood allergies who might go here...

The food is fresh and plentiful. The problems are exactly what you'd expect from a sushi "burrito". If you're a sushi lover like I am, you might notice a problem with the construction of a sushi burrito. Sushi roll slices are made to be one bite. You get the full taste of the seaweed, rice, cucumber, salmon, avacado, and spicy mayo all on one bite. Now imagine a roll so big that you can't get all that in just one bite. One bite you get avacado and cucumber, and the other you get salmon which makes every bite taste very inconsistent. Also since it's a burrito there is no dipping in soy sauce/Wasabi which is disappointing nor is it offered here. You can get extra "OG" sauce for 25 cents which is nothing other than spicy mayo. Even still the extra spice does not replace the taste of the soy/Wasabi combination. Also because it is again.... a burrito, the ratio between the seaweed/rice vs. the other ingredients is way off balance. Lastly....... because it's a burrito, the ingredients want to gush out the opposite end while biting into it making it pretty hard to eat. For the price of the food, the ingredients are all there to justify the price, but the execution of those ingredients is pretty poor. Had they just made me properly sized sushi rolls out of all of the ingredients instead of a burrito, the food would have been stellar. Not really...

Pros: nice concept, food is assembled fast with a nice presentation (ie IG worthy), friendly staff and good portion on burrito if you want to spilt with someone!

Cons: burritos are VERY messy. The bottom always seems to just disembowel itself Somehow. Ive tried two so far in hopes that it got better with a different option. First was the Seoul delicious. I am Korean American, so Imagine my disappointment when it didn’t have any of the flavours you’d associate with Korea. Even the kimchi slaw was far from anything kimchi tasting. It also fell apart so I ended up eating my burrito with a fork. VERY SALTY. Went back again and tried the tasty as cluck because it looked phenomenal in the photos. Everything EXCEPT the chicken was good. The breading of the chicken was incredibly hard to the point where my partner and I couldn’t eat it. Then on top of that this chicken was also SUPER SALTY. Both chicken options were almost inedible. and again, crumpled and fell apart in my hand so I had to eat it out of my hand and then use a fork for the rest. We’ll try it again next time and do a fish option since that is more so up my alley. Trying to give this place a chance cause I was so excited about...