Kawa's Hibachi Grill and Lounge — Restaurant in Tyler

I absolutely love the food here, it's my absolute favorite restaurant and my husband and I visit a lot even though we live a hour away. I'm obsessed with the salad dressing. Always buy a pint to take home. Last week I came in after a super long day at work, (I do work in Tyler) and got a dressing to go, nothing else. I tipped what I thought was the host $15 on a $6 salad dressing because I work in a restaurant and wanted to pass it forward. Big mistake... The host the helped me turned out to be a manager, Daisy. I mistakenly did not check the brown bag before leaving and ended up getting home to a ginger steak sauce... I was distraught as I wasn't driving another hour back and was going out of town. Called and spoke to Daisy, she explained she was a manager and had taken my order but some else bagged it, but went further into detail that the person that bagged it did this all the time. And he'd get a stern talking too AGAIN.

This is important as we fast forward to today, I FINALLY got to come get my messed up salad dressing that daisy promised me whenever I was back in town. Daisy was not at work today, so so spoke to one of three hosts. (I assumed they are all hosts cause they weren't doing anything else besides sitting the door) I explained last week and ask to even purchase a second salad dressing. She had a horrible attitude right away, but I ignored it cause I thought she could've been having a hard day. The lobby had 5-6 groups waiting on hibachi seating. Understandable. 15 mins go by, the lobby is empty and I ask the three hosts for my dressing. Ignored. Okay, maybe the didn't hear me. ... Different customer walks in, orders a salad dressing, pays, gets it and leaves. So I walk the two steps I was away and ask for mine...AGAIN. The host rolled her eyes, reach behind her and grabbed a bag she had sitting there at the table behind her. No apologies.. no kindness at all.

I left more frustrated then I already was cause while I had a bad day at work, I didn't take it out on any paying customer who spends their hard earned money there. The manager I spoke to on the phone (not Daisy) verbatim said the same spew Daisy spewed.. "omg I'm so sorry, those three are always causing issues." That's sad on the managers in this place if they can't properly train or hire decent customer service people. While I love the food, I think I'll take my money somewhere else where the people treat others with...

We made a reservation for the Hibachi table a few days before our visit for 4 people. They wouldn’t seat us til the whole party of 4 was present, which was understandable, so me & my bf sat at the bar & had a wine & beer until the other 2 showed up. Troy at the bar was great! They sat us at a table & within minutes a family of 5 was sat with us. The waitress took our orders of calamari for an appetizer, & 4 waters with a Shiner. The other family placed their order. When she brought out our drinks, the other family decided they wanted another table to themselves because they didn’t want the orders to get mixed up. Our calamari came out great! Right after the waitress had taken our order for 3 sushi rolls, fried rice, shrimp & scallops & shrimp fried rice, 4 plates of sushi came out & we thought maybe they were ours, because they were the same that we ordered, but shortly after the waitress returned & said they weren’t & had the staff take them to the other table. 3 sets of drinks & another sushi roll came to our table that weren’t ours. Our chef came over & cooked the fried rice, & shrimp & scallops & then the shrimp fried rice came cooked from the back. By the time our chef was done cooking, we still didn’t have the 3 sushi rolls, which 2 belonged to my bf that he ordered as his whole meal. He went over, spoke to our waitress and canceled the order for them. I’m guessing it was a manager as she never introduced herself, but she asked if we had received our rolls & we told her no & she asked us if we wanted her to make them for us to go & he said no as we knew they wouldn’t be as good once we drove our 45 minutes home. If we wanted Sushi to go we would’ve ordered it to go, instead he sat there with nothing to eat while I ate the half of my order that I DID receive & the other 2 ate their orders. The food we received was incredible, and the chef did check on our sushi for us, because our waitress was MIA & you could tell he didn’t understand what had happened. Our waitress only checked on our drinks once, that were completely empty by the time we left, and I still don’t know how we spent over an hour there & didn’t get his rolls that shouldn’t have taken more than 15 minutes to make. I understand things happen, but when you go to a restaurant of this nature, you should get the food you order & not have to order fast food on...

Would give zero stars if it were an option. Stopped by here on 3/20/22 at about 7 pm. Seated immediately- waitress was not attentive at all. “Chef” came, put rice on then went thru 3 or 4 order slips trying to figure out which one was ours. Subsequently the rice started to burn, as did the eggs. He finally found the right order then proceeded to finish cooking the rice and served it- burnt. The rest of the meal wasn’t much better- loads of garlic, same sauces used on everything (and way too much of it)- so everything tasted the same. Waitress barely checked on the table- one of our party found her in the bathroom standing there playing on her phone- chef had to go hunt down missing shrimp and a lobster tail- with food cooking on the table. “Chef” answered his phone twice while cooking for us. When he left, he didn’t even bother to clean up the cooktop- left a mess. No sauces, we had to ask for it once all our food was finished. None of us could eat our rice at all. Oh, and they say a total of 12 people at 1 table! 10 adults and 2 toddlers. I’ve eaten at many hibachi restaurants, never had this poor of an experience at such a premium price. Stay away from this place. We were traveling and thought we had stopped somewhere good, we were wrong. Oh, and everyone of us wound up booted and gassy.

ETA: this was the response from the restaurant:

“Response from the owner 16 hours ago Hi , Thomas ,

I apologize for your bad dining experience with us last night . This is not a kawas standard . I had personally addressed your issues to our chef team and management team, they decided to end the contract with your chef and retrain your server. Thank you for your review , we are always striving to improve and I assure you this won’t happen again. Have a nice day !”

Curiously I never identified the chef or waitress- so I’m not sure how they identified them- and since were not from the area, we will doubtfully...