Moko — Restaurant in New York

Had a truly terrible experience here tonight. I got a reservation here a few weeks ago and was excited to take my family (visiting from California) to their first omakase. I had been here 3 years ago and had a great experience but unfortunately tonight was the opposite. The food was okay, but definitely the worst omakase I’ve had in the city. Some of the pieces were great but some of the fish was subpar quality. In addition, it seemed like almost every other piece of sushi was finished with some sort of yuzu. I’m wondering if they ran out of or didn’t have time to prepare more toppings. Also, the hand rolls were all batched and then given out so mine was soggy when I got it. The service and atmosphere was bad on a whole different level. First off, I was notified via OpenTable the day before my reservation that they had moved it to 15 minutes earlier. Nobody called me to ask if this was okay, but it wasn’t a big deal. When we showed up to our reservation we were told that there was a large party there for an event and that we would be seated at the bar, which again was fine. This party was around 30 people in size, and for almost half the time I was there, they were standing and mingling. The restaurant is very small so people were right up against our chairs talking loudly (sometimes yelling profsnity) and it was extremely difficult to converse with the people in my party. Because of this extremely large party, it seemed that the staff was very overwhelmed and that translated to terrible service. We waited a very long amount of time in between each course, and there was only one chef serving the bar (13 people), while the others were working on the sushi for the large group. In my other experiences with omakase, the chef usually serves half that amount of people and is typically very friendly and detailed oriented. In this case, he served us all at the bar and then would have to yell the name of the sushi because nobody could hear anything over the loud talking. The whole thing ended taking up over 2 hours instead of the standard 1 hour. While we were there we also saw multiple parties with reservations get turned away because the restaurant was too overwhelmed. On a Saturday night in New York it would not be easy to walk in somewhere else. Lastly, we waited over 20 minutes for our dessert. It was very clear they forgot about us until finally a server asked if we were waiting for something. This server did acknowledge that the restaurant was overwhelmed and it was not their standard, but that was the extent to any sort of apology. I felt bad for the staff, who were working hard but they should not have been put in the position to serve so many people. They were clearly not prepared for it. I would rather have been called ahead of time and had the option to cancel my reservation, knowing there would be a large birthday party there, and I could have taken my family...

What a bizarre experience. We had a reservation and nobody acknowledged our existence (or the two groups with reservations in front of us) for 15 minutes. We were seated 30 minutes after our reservation time. Other customers in the restaurant looked unhappy. We probably should have walked away at that point.

For $95 omakase I'd expect pieces to be brought out one at a time, warm rice, fresh fish, properly seasoned so you don't need to use extra soy sauce or wasabi. As we wait and wait, eventually an hour and a half since we arrived and still no fish, we realize the impending situation... they're going to serve all 13 pieces of this "omakase" at once on a single platter! The server gives us a rapid fire rundown of what each of the 13 pieces is, which nobody is going to remember, so we don't know what we're eating. The temperature and consistency of the rice is off, the quality of fish is just ok, with some pieces tasting slightly fishy, and the pieces are not particularly seasoned. This is not omakase - this is a supermarket sushi platter. Granted, it's a tasty supermarket sushi platter which I would gladly pay $20-30 for, maybe a bit more, but highway robbery at $95.

The service was slow, clueless, and surprisingly soft spoken. They asked "do you want ginger?" as if it was a trick question. When we weren't immediately ready to order, the server disappeared for 20 minutes and returned to shyly ask, "remind me, what did you order?" "Um, we haven't ordered." They served us a carafe of apology sake, which was very nice, but then took it away before it was done. When we asked if the dessert had dairy in it - one of our party is lactose intolerant - the server said "I'm not sure" and shrugged. "Ok... can you go find out?" The server undercharged us when we paid the bill, and then realizing the mistake asked us "what should I do?". "I don't know, you tell us!" They had us make up the difference in the tip, which is very odd. By the time we finished our last piece of sushi the kitchen staff had already disappeared into the night.

No idea how this place has 4.5 stars. Save your money for much better omakase nearby (e.g....

The experience here was disappointing to the point of upsetting; we spent $250 ($95 x 2 people + tax/tip) and the quality of the omakase was very lacking. Each piece was doused in so much sauce that it overwhelmed the fish and the rice was quite dry and old at the beginning, which seems difficult to achieve with these two opposing observations but they managed to do so. The rice for the later pieces was fresh, but it was too hot which overwhelmed the fish. And all of the fish, except for the blue fin tuna and uni (sea urchin) were all precut, which makes me question the freshness of the fish itself, but again, the amount of sauce used for each piece overwhelmed any chance to taste the actual fish. The sushi was served on a wooden board, but they didn’t wipe the board after each piece, which I can understand if that is too nitpicky, but given the amount of sauce on each piece, the board ends up just being so moist with all the different sauces which bleeds into each following piece. The miso soup at the beginning was also incredibly salty and the tofu had a texture that felt like it was sitting in the soup for a while, so my guess is that the soup was also quite old. The ice cream dessert was also icy, but they also added more sauce onto that. Albeit it was strawberry sauce, but still, I ingested SO much sauce for this meal. The ginger was also not fresh, it was a huge pile of very dried out ginger and no additional wasabi available on the boards. The atmosphere also added to the very mid experience; it felt like they were going for a mix of “high end omakase” and the Japanese austere aesthetic with their all-wood decor, but fails to achieve that as the place seemed to be made with plywood or fake wood made out of plastic. The music also didn’t really match the environment. Ultimately, the biggest issue that I had was the price point. It would be different if I paid $50 for a poor omakase experience, but given that this place markets and prices itself as a relatively higher end omakase place and we ended up paying $250 for a meal that fell so short of that, I left the restaurant feeling similarly to...