Cafe Mochi — Restaurant in St. Louis

TLDR: Cafe Mochi was an awful experience but they have good food, Wait for Blue Ocean to open dine in again!!

I used a Facebook group to find a good Sushi recommendation for a birthday dinner. Lots of people recommended Blue Ocean and Cafe Mochi. Our go to is Blue Ocean, authentic sushi, great atmosphere, and wonderful service. However they are not taking dine in, so we went to Cafe Mochi.

Here was my experience.

There was plenty of parking adjacent to the restaurant which was nice..

The atmosphere was ehhh. The restaurant didn't seem clean upon entrance, kind of rundown looking, they did have outdoor seating which was nice, but inside was kind of blah.

The service was awful, we had reservations for a party of 7, and they seated us fairly promptly, however we did have to go up a half flight of stairs which isn't an issue for most people but I'm not sure they could have accommodated us if we had wheelchair bound member with us. The waitress seemed just bothered by our presence, I'd tell you her name but she never gave it, at one point when I asked for extra napkins she legitimately roller her eyes. She did seem to be the only waitress for our section but that isn't an excuse for poor manners. I also had to ask for drink refills and another round of alcoholic beverages. We waited so long for service that all of our drinks needed refilled at the same time.

Our appetizers came out at different times (weird) One of the meals (chicken fried rice) was not delivered. However the table next to us received a sole plate of fried rice at the same time as we got our other 2 dinners so I'm sure that was meant for us. When we finally asked where the fried rice was (because our waitress was not communicating anything) they said the kitchen was backed up. After the 3rd time asking for it we just simply asked that they take it off our bill because everyone was done eating at the table.

When I realized they messed up one of the sushi rolls the food runner walked away and said she would tell the kitchen, so we started eating the other sushi on the platter. Then she came back with a to go carton and said she needed to take the messed up sushi roll back with her. Then she looked at the platter trying to figure out the best way to do it and decided that just taking the entire platter (that we were eating off of) with her was the best option. She did return the platter sans roll, however that was just weird.

We ordered 2 cocktails, pink geisha, which were delicious, but when we asked for another round of drinks she took up not only the kids fountain drinks but also our cups. She went to the back and brought us out the same cups with a refill of the cocktail. She refilled our cocktail drinks! In what universe does that happen?

Drinks were served in a plastic cups, the kids softdrinks, but also our cocktails. Not what I expect when I'm eating at a sit down restaurant. Not only that when we asked for silverware they provided 3 plastic forks an no knives so my grandmother and son were left trying to eat an entire chicken breast with just a fork. Interesting.

The sushi however was delicious. We ordered a fried California roll, a Philly roll, a butterfly roll, a bagel roll, a rainbow roll, a Hawaiian roll, a lemon drop roll, and fried shrimp roll. They were well prepared and displayed, and they provided plenty of ginger and Wasabi. We were pleased with that aspect of the dinner.

Needless to say I cannot wait for Blue Ocean to open dine in again...

I don't even want to give this place one star. We arrived for a birthday dinner (4 of us). We were seated outside and waiting for the other two members of our party. We informed the waiter that two more were on their way to which he replied, "good, because I'm really behind." We went ahead and placed an appetizer order while he was there. The rest of the party arrived and one of the appetizers came out and the other didn't come out for several minutes after that, we were surprised to find that our calamari tempura was vegetables. There was not a single piece of seafood in the appetizer. We informed one of the ladies that was delivering food about the calamari and all she had to say was, "ok," with an attitude. Our waiter did not come over to check on us until we flagged him down close to an hour into this visit to ask him how much longer the food would be and he said it should be out anytime now. It began to sprinkle and we asked the same lady with the attitude earlier if we could move inside, and once again with the attitude, told us that it was probably full but that she would go look and never returned. Our waiter came back out and began moving other tables inside and didn't even look in our direction. I flagged him down and asked him to box our food to go and to go ahead and bring the check. His reply? "You're going to have to wait because I have to go get this table's order." So we did wait... and waited... and waited... (all the while it was still raining on us). He finally brought the check out and said that they were boxing the food up now. We waited... waited another 15 minutes before going inside. I found the host and told him that we were only paying for the things that we did get and nothing else. I told him not to bother with the rest of the order. When the host said that they HADN'T EVEN STARTED MAKING OUR FOOD, our waiter and the lady with the attitude would not look at us, acknowledge us, or even walk by us. The service was absolute trash and what food we did get wasn't great either. It's hard to mess up edamame but the "calamari" vegetable appetizer was extremely disappointing. Do not waste your time here at all. --- We were there for a total of 1.5 hours just trying to get 6 sushi rolls. I want to make it known that after we left we drove to three different locations, unfortunately they were closed on Sundays, but settled on Herbie's in Clayton and had our food and check in less than an hour. AGAIN, we went to THREE DIFFERENT PLACES BEFORE FINDING A SPOT, ORDERED FOOD, AND GOT OUR CHECK in less time than we spent sitting and waiting... and waiting.... and waiting... and waiting at Cafe Mochi. If you like wasting your time, being hungry and angry, then...

Summary: Good sushi 🍣, consistent food quality and service 👍🏼, and AMAZING CUSTOMER SERVICE 👫✨ We’ve going here since 2014 and absolutely LOVE this place! The Food: Highly recommend the Volcano 🌋 Roll. It’s a shrimp tempura roll wrapped with thin slices of avocado that has this AMAZINGLY TASTY topping! The topping is warm, slightly creamy, and deliciously savory. It consists of what I think is spicy mayo (creamy), tobiko (fish roe, which makes it salty and savory), super thinly shredded strips of radish (adds most amazing crisp, texture without any weird veg taste), and baby scallops (cooked perfectly, so they’re tender and almost melt in your mouth!) My fiancé usually orders that, the spicy tuna and occasionally the Dragon 🐉 Roll. I always get tamago (sweet egg sushi) and miso soup! The quality of the sushi has almost always been the same every time we’ve ordered The Customer Service ✨: All of the servers have been great; they’re fast, friendly, and professional We usually get the pretty, petite Asian lady and she knows us by now. We usually order the same thing so she remembers what we like, down to small details like the fact that I don’t like green onions in my soup (which I really appreciate) We’ve had other servers too; not sure if they work there anymore but we also used to get the Caucasian lady with short hair and tattoos or the young-ish Asian guy and they were always great. We recently had a new server, a younger Caucasian girl (with blondish, red hair maybe, can’t remember for sure) and she was also pretty awesome! The chefs don’t interact with customers all too much but they’ve always been nice enough to me: occasionally they say “Thank you [for coming],” or say “Goodbye,” as I leave, which is nice All the employees have always been consistently pleasant; like we’ve never had a bad experience/interaction with any of them, ever! Sometimes the service is slow during lunch (noon-ish) and dinner (5-8ish) hours but that’s to be expected since they’re one of the few (more popular) sushi spots in the city. So try to be patient and understanding, I’m sure they’re all doing their best to get your order out to you! They always try to update us on the status our order when they noticed we’ve been waiting awhile. And then when they eventually bring our order out, they always make sure to apologize for the long wait time (even though we tell them that it’s ok/fine every single time, and we’ve been coming here for years!) ✨ I really do love the customer service because it’s so RARE to have a place in the city with both GOOD and CONSISTENTLY good customer service. They’ve always been like that since we first started...