Tenzan — Restaurant in New York

Sorry long review. I used to go to Tenzan on Columbus ave & 2nd ave religiously circa 2010-2014 until I moved to Queens and getting into Manhattan was more out of the way. I have always had a good experience. I went there on Thursday afternoon for the first time in years because I was visiting a friend on the UWS. The first thing that I noticed when walking through the door was a strong fishy oder mixed with a bleach type cleaning smell. My friend wanted to leave but I insisted we stay because I remember how good the rolls and sushi are. We sat at the sushi bar in the back corner and proceeded to wait 15-20 before the waiter acknowledged us, again my friend wanted to leave. We watched as the lone sushi chef prepared various orders and left them on the counter for the waiter to take to the tables, some of the orders just sat there next to me for over 15-20minutes. My friend kept commenting that it’s not good to let raw fish just sit there so long before being served. I reassured him all would be ok. Finally we get served, get our food, I ordered Cali roll, tuna roll & salmon sushi, he gets brown rice avocado rolls without fish. He tells me it’s the worst roll he has had, how hard is it to mess up an avocado roll and why we didn’t go to our go to sushi place in the west village. My food seemed ok but not as good as I remembered from years ago. Fast forward to later that night I get fever & chills and bad pain in stomach and I’m down for the count this weekend with food poisoning. Tenzen was the only thing I ate that day, next time I’ll stick with the higher quality sushi places if I ever feel like eating raw fish...

Don't even know where to start. We arrived at 45 mins before it was opened, and there was already a line on a Tuesday night. We were 5th in line and yay, got seated without reservations at 5:30pm. Was so overwhelmed wth excitement as soon as we got in because we were seated in the bar, where much the actions were. Very cool and casual ambience there.

Everyone there are super friendly and patient explaining the items they are serving. I love the idea of trying out a little bit of everything, nicely presented. I must admit not everything is good, so it did not exactly meet the high expectations. The chefs are super clever with balancing flavors of some of their dishes.

The concept (American dim sum) is great. Service is superb. The wait (outside) might be a deal breaker for some. But if you are ready to something out of your comfort zone, and inclined to wait for hours (or make 2 month reservations in ahead), it's a great experience dining with this intimate serving experience. Basically, there are two menus to select from: 1) rotational kind where each server brings them to you and/or 2) choose...

I've come here for a dinner a few times and have had tasty meals with okay service. However, last night my family and I waited for 30 minutes just for our order to be taken. No one checked in on us or apologized, even after I had to ask for us to be given menus after we had been ignored. I had to come up to the host stand and ask for the following (all separately!) : utensils, soy sauce, wasabi, plates, the check.

The whole meal we just felt like uninvited guests. Couple next to us also waited a real long time, with no one coming over to say they're seen and someone would be coming. When I asked to speak to the manager, he treated us extremely rudely, even after I pointed out that one in my party had to adjust her insulin because we weren't served as she's a diabetic, did not apologize, and just put the bad service to the fact that they were understaffed and that staff were on a break when we were seated, which was 8:00pm.

I got the sense that actually the front of the house doesn't want people to dine at Tenzan. There are plenty of other quality Japanese restaurants in the...