Banzai Sushi — Restaurant in Sacramento

This is a one-star rated restaurant across the board. The restaurant greets you with black mold all over the floor molding trim. It was utterly disgusting and unsightly. I came here with a friend and he told me that he goes to the restaurant occasionally and we felt like eating a teriyaki bento box. As we were looking through the menu, I smelled a foul odor. I said why does it smell like pee here? I realized that the bathroom was located a few tables behind us, and again, what a disgusting experience that I almost wanted to walk out of there. We proceeded to place our order and I ordered my Salmon Teriyaki with Chicken Katsu bento box. My order came and the Salmon was underwhelming, It was paper thin and the sauce was a dark and bitter teriyaki sauce. It tasted awful. The Chicken Katsu had dark red meat which I don't prefer, I prefer white meat for my chicken. We were served our food without utensils so we sat there while the one waitress served other customers. We asked the waiter, who seemed to be the one in charge of the place, maybe he was the owner. He answered the phone as my friend said, "excuse me", and that waiter told my friend to hush and signaled with his pointer finger across his mouth and pointed on the phone. He obviously did not want to be disturbed because he was taking an order from another customer. So we waited for the waitress to be available (maybe his girlfriend or wife?). She ended up giving us the utensils after 3-4 minutes of staring at our food. No apologies from anyone. This kind of service is a total disappointment and unacceptable. At the end of our not so pleasant meal, my friend and I had leftovers and we asked for a to-go box and it was approaching 8pm. It seemed the restaurant was closing for the night and the rude waiter took their walkway carpet from the ground and started flicking it out in front of us while our food was still on the plate and about to scoop it into the to-go box. My jaw dropped. Then he let the carpet drop-fold into half onto the floor, and grabbed a second walkway carpet in that skinny walkway, again right next to our table and flicked it out again and let it drop-fold halfway onto the floor, essentially stacking those two carpets on top of one another. I don't want to imagine how much micro dust went into our food. I sill gave the waitress 15% tip that no one deserved. But really? What happened to good customer service and good clean food and good clean environment? If you want to get sushi or bento box, please avoid thiis place at all cost!!!! Bad service, bad food, bad waiter!!! We don't appreciate you. You need to clean up your restaurant and wipe away your nasty attitude...

Since the sushi restaurants are quite limited in the Greenhaven-Pocket neighborhood of Sacramento, "Banzai Sushi" is definitely an above average place that has been consistently good based on the hundreds of reviews dating back to 2006. And for any restaurant to withstand the test of time that long. you know they must be doing something right.

Located directly at the corner of Florin Rd. and Riverside Blvd., this place is tucked in a fairly busy shopping center that includes a Grocery Outlet, Baskin' Robbins, and a Shell gas station. Parking though wasn't much of an issue as I was able to park close enough to pick up food on my lunch break (which was on Friday 3/4/2022 at 12:15pm).

I decided on ordering a "Mix Tempura Appetizer" which included deep fried shrimp and an assortment of vegetables. For my main entrée, I went with their non-raw Banzai Maki roll of their "Lion King". This popular roll included crab salad complete with avocado inside while baked hot (for 10 minutes) that consisted of salmon, green onions, and special sauce. In general, this place has a very extensive selection of sushi rolls (raw & cooked). And everything else including Donburi, Bento Boxes, Ramen, Udon, Noodles, and several party trays.

After placing my order, my sushi & appetizer was ready within 12 minutes; not bad considering it was their lunchtime rush + my roll had to be baked. After making the quite 10 minute drive back to my office, I was very wowed with how big the portions were. My tempura appetizer did not skimp on the items while my sushi was more than enough food to fill me up. Overall, the sushi was cooked very well while the rice was moist and everything held up together well.

They do have very generous hours of operation being open 7 days a week from 11:30am to 9:00pm Sunday through Thursday and 11:30am to 10:00pm Fridays and Saturdays. They do have an ample indoor seating area but no seating outside. All in all, this is definitely one of the best options of sushi in this part of Sacramento; especially if you're looking to something in the suburbs and away from downtown. My rating for "Banzai Sushi", an above...

Today is our wedding anniversary. They of course wouldn’t know that, so I can’t fault them. But, it does an extra sting to the lousy food we just had delivered.

We ordered 8 items via Door Dash. We immediately got a phone call letting us know they don’t have Tamago (did not specify if they were out or not on the menu anymore) and asked if we want to replace it with something. While I appreciate the immediate response, it’s one of the few things my daughter will eat and part of the reason we ordered from them is that Door Dash’s menu showed they had it.

We got our order delivered and I started to open the containers, and everything looked good, except we couldn’t tell what we were looking at. One container had 2 rolls in it we think was a rainbow roll and a “pocket” roll. They were indistinguishable from each other. 2 rolls put in 3 rows, sauce poured over each row, and roe coating only the second row (ha). There is no way to tell if the rolls were split up so one each is in their own column, because if they were, why was roe added the way it was?

When you’re enjoying hot sake, it makes little difference because you just want to eat and everything looks so good, and that’s the biggest letdown. It was bland. All of it. The fish tasted like they ran it under a cold tap to wash out the flavor. Did we order the day before a fresh fish delivery? Was THAT our mistake? Again, we’re pretty buzzed on sake and we still noticed.

Considering the amount we spent on this, the special day that it is, the lack of the one thing we wanted for our kid, and the bizarrely high reviews it’s getting on multiple platforms, I would say I am beyond disappointed and will very likely never order from them again. Time to finish...