Anaya Sushi & Ramen — Restaurant in New Haven

We absolutely love the food here but we've had too many times where the service has been so abysmal that I have to give Anaya a 1. We order food online through Grubhub and multiple times it would get to be 1.5 - 2 hours and we'd have to call to check on it because it hadn't gotten there yet. But the other night has solidified that Anaya needs a better system for orders, and better customer service in general. We ordered at 7:50 PM on Grubhub. Knowing that on Grubhub, it says they stop taking orders around 9:15, we actually called at 9:10 when our food hadn't arrived yet. They told us they were backed up with orders- totally fine! we know places are understaffed, and we said that's fine, we're happy to wait. But it got to be 10:10. We called again, mentioning we were still waiting on a Grubhub order. The woman on the phone said "oh its ready you can come grab it now". my fiance had to explain we ordered it on Grubhub, we've been waiting 2 hours for it to be delivered. She just said "oh, ok it's coming now". Well, it never came. We waited until 10:45 before calling again, and no one picked up. They had closed. So we hoped our food must be on the way, right? They said it was ready and it was on the way, back at 10:10 PM. By 11 PM, we had to cut our losses and figure out something else for dinner. We waited over 3 hours only to not receive our food, at all- and no call or notification to tell us it wasn't coming. We even checked back doors and neighboring apartments in case they got the wrong address. We've had issues before with Anaya but overlooked them because the ramen and sushi was very good. But we can't keep ordering if we can't even be guaranteed our food will...

This place is full of contradictions. The decor and ambiance is quite pleasant, but the dine-in service is a bit lacking. The food was decent, and Japanese in style, but none of it really "wowed" me. The ramen was filling, but lacking in overall flavor. The experience was not bad, but I expected more from the look of the place (I admit I had high hopes). Perhaps I caught the chef on an off day. Still the presentation of the dishes was nice, but appetizers are served with the main meal. If you didn't get a soup or salad with your meal, be prepared to watch your friends eat while you wait for your appetizer or main course.

As for the service, let's just say that you need to make sure you get your drink order with your food order because you will not see the staff again until they present your final check. A refill would have been nice, and the bar would have made a bit more, but ... oh well. If you try harder than I did, you might be able to flag one of the staff down. Who knows, perhaps the staff were consciously trying to be polite and leave us to our meal undisturbed.

Overall, I'm not sure I'd go again, but I don't...

I stopped here one weekend around 5 and found the place fairly empty (maybe 6 other people in the restaurant). It is one of the roomier urban sushi restaurants in which I've eaten. The sushi was pretty decent for the price and it came out pretty quickly. The waitstaff was kind of meh. Our waitress took our order and came back a few times to see if we wanted anything else and to clean items from the table, but her inquiries seemed absolutely perfunctory. She also gave us the check fairly quickly even though we were still working our way through our drinks and the place was still pretty quiet (there may have been 2 other people in the restaurant at the time). The seats in the booths face two ways, so if one sits down heavily and pushes the seat back, the diner sitting on the other side of the bench at the next table gets pushed that much closer to his table. Overall, I'd...