Kura Revolving Sushi Bar — Restaurant in Tacoma

Ok, let me preface this by saying that I’ve eaten a lot of sushi. The best of which has been in Japan. I do not expect sushi in the US to be comparable to Sushi in Japan. It’s always different. I’ve had good sushi in the US, but it doesn’t usually come close to the average sushi I’ve had in Japan.

Kura Sushi is a chain. The atmosphere is great, reminiscent of some great kaitensushi I’ve had. The service was fine, the drink delivery robot was cute but an unnecessary time sink for delivery of… water.

I generally rate sushi in my mind by a couple factors.

Price/Volume (how much it costs vs. how much you get.)

Fish/Rice

Karaage Chicken (or other non Sushi items)

Kura: Price/Volume - at around $4 a plate for the least expensive items, and a not infrequent volume of a single piece per plate. This is just bad. Too much money for too little food. I have paid hundreds of dollars per person for Omakase at some of the best sushi restaurants in the Country and been completely satisfied, so the “It’s sushi, it’s supposed to be expensive” line doesn’t work. At $116 after tip and a generally disappointing experience, I left here supremely unsatisfied

Which brings us to

Fish/Rice - The minuscule volumes of rice are the only point in their favor. The issue is the volume of fish. On more than one occasion I picked up a piece of tuna only to find it so thin as to be see through. The Negitoro, tasted like it was cut with something, did not taste like tuna, let alone Otoro. The only wild caught salmon option seemed cooked… this is unfortunate considering local salmon season is in full swing and really fresh fish is easy to come by. The Ikura came as gunkanmaki but only half covered with the ikura. I didn’t count the individual salmon eggs, but I could have because there were so few, the other half of the gunkan covered in cucumber. The only two items that were of the proper proportions were the Tamago and the Tekkamaki… but that isn’t enough to save them considering the

Karaage was cut so small and delivered in such small proportion, with the tiniest sliver of lemon, it didn’t matter that it was seasoned pretty well, it was dry and kind of gross as a result. Served with a Yuzu mayo that left a waxy feeling in my mouth and added nothing to the whole situation.

I was hoping, at the very least, to have an adequate kaitensushi option in Tacoma, perhaps even a decent one. Maybe I’m asking for too much, or my idea of what Sushi can be has poisoned me against what an American consumer wants in their sushi. Maybe our collective standards are just so low that we’re willing to pay a whole lot of money for garbage and have learned to be content with it, but my experience here has left me supremely depressed. I’d say I hope they last in the space, but I won’t be back… so I really...

The sushi was decent. My favorite was a salmon nigiri with sesame oil on top (came with two pieces). However, there were too many issues to have it be worth coming back to again:

There is a learning curve to using their services, maybe this would be fun for teenagers to tinker with. But, it feels unnecessary, and cumbersome. They give you a QR code for ordering on your phone, when you use it, you see the menu. However, there are no drinks on this menu, so then you have to go back to the computer screen and order drinks there before using the QR code. With the drinks come your chop sticks and wasabi. The plates are difficult to take off the conveyor belt. We had to wait for the server to come and give us directions for removing the plates, because there is a mechanical lid on top of them. This just all seems so overly complicated adding more time to an excessive wait time before you can actually eat the food, which is counterproductive to the whole reason we are coming to a conveyor belt sushi place: The speed of sushi shoved in our mouths!

The price is expensive and your party (especially kids) is incentivized to get more plates and put them through the chute to watch a cartoon at 5 plates or get a prize at 15. The issue with that is you can’t visualize how many plates your party has gone through, and at $3.95, the bill racks up quickly. All the blue plates are 3.95 and all the plates that came across the conveyor to choose from are blue. We didn’t order any plates from the menu. Our party was a party of three, and before the tip, our bill was about $86 dollars for 17 plates and three sodas.

The 3.95 plates do not have many pieces of sushi on them, with the cheaper dishes of maki having four pieces, rolls with salmon or tuna having three pieces, with the more expensive pieces of sashimi only having two or sometimes only one piece (for the much more expensive cuts) on them.

Another issue is the wait time, they said it would be a 5-10 minute wait, and we thought no problem. However, we waited over 25 minutes for a table.

Is it convenient, yes, it is inside the mall. But, if you are not already in the mall looking for a place to eat sushi, I would recommend you choose somewhere else...

When you get there you have to sign in for the waitlist and it’ll tell you an approximate time till your turn. When putting in your phone #, it sends you a text. Mine said 0-10min, so I decided to walk around the mall until they text me that it’s my turn right? No, they literally want you to just stand outside the restaurant until they call your name, i found this out after 25min of walking till I realized it went over the approx time. I walk back and find out the people that came after me were already in the restaurant and now there’s even more people waiting. I talked to the front desk lady and she told me to continue waiting. When I first got there, there were 2 ppl waiting and 4+ open tables.

So what’s the whole point of the text thing? It’s supposed to text you when it’s your turn, just like many other places like kizuki ramen. You’re in a mall… When I got to my table I was told that a server will come to explain everything, but nobody came to assist us for over 15min so we ended up trying to pull the sushi plates out ourselves, with much failure we ended up finally getting the hang of it. The service was terrible, you press on the pad to get assistance and have to wait in line, then when the waiter comes, they ask what we need and then we have to wait again for them to for fill our request. Can you believe it took over 20min just to check out with someone? They left the check and left again so I had to go on the pad and ask for them to come back to take my card..then when they came back to take my card I had to wait again for the receipt and to sign it……all the waiting is ridiculous. The food was ok, few were good, but most weren’t, there’s no pricing so you have to look it up and can’t really tell from the belt, it was the same rotation of 8-10 things on the belt and most times it’s already taken before they get to your side. Overall wouldn’t come again because of terrible to non existent service and the workers seem very new to everything even technologically so it makes everything more complicated. Am I being dramatic? No, just come here and experience yourself and you’ll...