Unico Tokyo Pasta — Restaurant in Redondo Beach

I was really excited to hear that another Japanese pasta spot was opening up—ever since I tried pasta in Japan, I’ve been a fan. So, we decided to check it out on a Saturday night. We added our names to the waitlist on Yelp around 4:50 PM while heading to the restaurant and were seated in just five minutes. The parking lot was a bit crowded, but there’s probably some street parking available.

The restaurant has a cute and casual vibe, which I really liked. We ordered the garlic bread, Unico salad, Neapolitan pasta, and the Unico Bolognese pasta. The salad came out first—fresh, crisp, and had a lot of dressing. The garlic bread smelled amazing, so I had high hopes, but unfortunately, the flavor didn’t live up to the aroma. It was surprisingly mild, lacking that rich, garlicky-buttery punch.

I was especially excited for the Neapolitan pasta since it’s not something you see on many menus. The sauce was decent but felt like it was missing something, and the pasta itself I don’t think was cooked properly—it wasn’t really al dente, possibly due to its thicker texture, but maybe that’s a personal preference. My husband ordered the Bolognese, which is usually his go-to, but this one was not great. While the sauce coated the pasta, it was on the dry side and the flavor was definitely lacking.

Overall, I love that Redondo Beach has a new Japanese pasta spot, but I think I’ll stick to Pasta e Pasta and Spoon House for my...

Wasted Money, Wasted Calories. As soon as I looked at menu, we should have walked out. I didn’t realize it was part of the Japonica chain until we had already ordered appetizers. Japonica is terrible but this was worse. We ordered the burrata, the butter garlic shrimp and the garlic bread. The shrimp was flavorless and no garlic or butter was ever in its vicinity. The five tiny shrimp floated in a vat of overly rosemaried olive oil atop 5 canned rubbery slices of mushroom. Completely awful. We then figured we’d make the best of it and try the “most popular” vodka pasta. This was so immediately “chef boyardee” with the matching teenie tiney canned vienna sausage weenies cut into it. If my 10 year old child made this, I would have pretended to eat it and loved it and thrown it out. We threw the fork in and asked for the check. How anyone thinks this is passable food to serve in a restaurant and charge for it, is mind blowing to us. Atmosphere is cute, love the design. However, if you want a cool loud vibe, at least splurge on some speakers around the place not just a faint blown out echo of inaudible music coming from one device in the kitchen. Service was friendly, but our server didn’t check on us and we bussed ourselves. Our server also lied about the ingredients of the food. Would never recommend!...

Unico opened up recently in Redondo beach and we were very satisfied with our first visit. It definitely won’t be our last visit

Beautiful place, love the atmosphere. We came on a Friday night and there was plenty of staff, All well trained and very friendly. Parking can be difficult with the small lot but that’s to be expected in the redondo beach area.

For food, we tried the garlic bread, yasai uni cream, and curry bolognese. Both pasta dishes had good portions

Garlic bread is nice to have with soup or your pasta. Lots of garlic, crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. It pairs well with the uni cream pasta, I loved using the bread to absorb the cream sauce.

Yasai uni cream is delicious. Portions are very generous. With how rich and creamy it is, I can’t finish a dish by myself. I do wish there was some actual uni in the dish though and not just in the cream

Curry bolognese was delicious. Excellent take on a bolognese. Has the essence of a bolognese sauce with the curry flavor. Not too spicy and plenty of flavor. Add in some pepper flakes and it’s perfect.

Oh the pasta in both dishes were cooked al dente and perfect.

One complaint, I wish when we ordered hot tea, it wasn’t just a cup of hot water with a tea bag thrown in. Maybe serve “house” tea made in the back so the...