Kouyou Sushi — Restaurant in Seattle

Was excited to go try a new sushi place, but this ended up being a pretty disastrous experience with a nice helping of food poisoning at the end.

As for the good:

The service was fine and the staff were friendly.

Now for the rest:

The vibe of the whole place was extremely weird— it feels like a pop-up location rather than an actual restraunt. There was no music playing at all which immediately felt off as the whole place was unsettlingly quiet minus the kitchen. Speaking of which— the kitchen is behind a wall but that wall stops about halfway up to the ceiling, so you hear everything. As soon as something starts getting fried, the whole place just sounds like screaming oil until it's done. It's a track delivery system where you order from a touchscreen, but there's no mounted screens for the ordering system; instead they just hand you a tablet to place on the table. The whole place genuinely seemed like it was half finished.

The food was mediocre at the absolute best. The fish was pretty low quality and the yellowtail on my rainbow roll was terrible and very clearly not even remotely fresh. The price per dish is lower than the other places nearby, but the portions are tiny compared to basically anywhere else. You could eat at any other place in the same per-person price bracket and although you'd get less variety, you'd have significantly higher quality food with much larger portions.

Later that night I ended up with terrible stomach pain and got stuck in the bathroom for over an hour with extreme diarrhea. My partner was less lucky and ended up with food poisoning, and has been in extreme discomfort and pain for most of last night and all of today.

Avoid this place like the plague. Your money is far better off being spent at literally any of the other local...

I dined in with a friend. I was happy with the food, and we were especially impressed with the flavor and texture of the seared salmon nigiri. Smoky flavor and very tender

I need to give a lower rating because part of the dining experience was weird and honestly felt a bit scammy. There was a beef nigiri item on the menu that was labelled as having a special deal, with each person at a table getting a free order of it. Between my friend and I, we got one order just to try it. When the bill came, the beef nigiri was still included in the final price. We asked why, and the staff member said that it wasn't on special anymore and acknowledged that the menu was misleading. However, we only ordered the nigiri because we thought that it would be free. When we told them that, they just said something along the lines of "the menu is wrong and you still need to pay for it". We had already ordered another $80 worth of items, so it's not like we were just trying to get free stuff. I'm surprised that they would leave an out-of-date deal on their digital menu, especially since it has an impact on price. I'm also surprised that they didn't let us know or confirm that we still wanted the nigiri before it came out from the kitchen if they knew that their menu...

I was really impressed with the delivery system, and the decor is really nice. The atmosphere is everything you'd expect from an upscale sushi restaurant.

But the food leaves a lot to be desired. Its not bad by any stretch, but it's pricey and not very flavorful.

I had the udon with marinated pork, and the broth was just salty, and the pork was tough and didn't appear to be marinated in anything. I know that a bowl of udon isn't supposed to be wildly flavorful but this was just bland.

I also had a chicken karaage taco, which was small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. The chicken was cold, dry and tough, and the only things that made it interesting were the nori taco shell, and the piece of pickled daikon under the chicken.

Its worth noting that at this point the restaurant has only been open for two weeks or so. So there may be some issues that they're working through. My take on it is that while there is novelty in sushi delivered by trains, it's not going to keep customers coming back if the food is boring...