Blufish — Restaurant in Vernon Hills

This place has much better interior, than exterior. Do not get fooled by outside look as a small takeout place, inside it's a really a nice bistro.

The interior is super nice, made in modern-Japanese restaurant style, where wooden bars, floors and wine cellars perfectly match with marble sushi-bar stands and leather couches. Looks very up-to-date and fresh. I can't skip the bathroom here, check out the photo attached, look how many small pieces of attention to details are in the place, where they could've just stuck a couple of toilets and sinks like some others do. Moreover, there is a lounge music (like in spa) playing thru tiny speakers somewhere in the room, probably in theory it should make you feel much comfortable doing your thing... Weird, but its very cool and distinctive. Just keep it cleaner, I've been here like a year ago and it was kept much, much cleaner before.

As to the kitchen, the menu is very creative, there is a number of signature rolls to choose from. I like to sit at the sushi-bar and watch these guys making their masterpieces, and I can easily say that ingredients are stored well, the chefs look and dressed very professional, and the servers are taking prepared food in just few seconds once its done, to deliver it fresh. 5 stars for the crew too.

Now briefly to the food, Panko Scallop is super tender, that breaded cover matches great with teriyaki and this is a must try! Few small drawbacks here, Veggie Queen roll has a delicious eggplant on top, but its peel doesn't chew so I had to spit it out after each maki piece. I also got Ocean Drive roll, and although I was absolutely delighted by the combo of yellowtail and tuna in it, the structure could've been improved. 5 of 6 pieces fell apart before I ate them. Other than that, In general I liked the food a lot.

Service was nice and very fast, nothing especially remarkable, but everyone smiled to us and refills were on time, so zero complains.

As a small conclusion, if you are in the area, you should definitely give this place a visit; if I lived closer to it, I probably would go there...

After reading all the great reviews on yelp and word of mouth from co workers, i decided to give this place a try. Their decor is beautiful. Very clean and modern. I loved it! It's a fun "date night" place to go to. We arrived at 11:40 just shortly after they opened for lunch and there was already a few people dining in. We decided to order the chicken, beef and salmon bento box and also shrimp and vegetable tempura. The beef was pretty good. It reminds me a little of the korean bulgogi. They give you a good portion of the beef. I did not like their fried rice at all. It had tons of black peppers and was dry and kind of cold compared to the other dishes. Another dish that was weird to me was their california roll. The crabmeat was very gooy. It tastes almost like they made crabmeat salad and wrapped that into a california roll. It tasted funny to me and didn't quiet like the texture. The chicken bento was okay. The meat was kind of dry and not as tender. The salmon is good. The side of lightly battered chicken (kinda of like popcorn chicken) is delicious. It was crispy on the outside and tender on the inside. I enjoyed that side dish very much. It has a very light drizzle of sweet and sour sauce over it.

In the beginning, our server checked up on us, refilled our free hot green tea but towards the end of the meal, he disappeared and we had to flag another server to get boxes to go and flagged another server for the check. There was probably a good 15 mins of wait from getting our boxes and finding someone to get the check to us...

When i was walking out the door, i saw some dishes that other diners had ordered and some of the plating was very pretty. There was a nice...

The in-restaurant dining experience we received deserves 3 or less stars, but the quality of the food deserves 5. We called ahead to make sure they were still taking tables at 8pm, they said yes. When we arrived a few minutes before 8, we waited over 15 minutes to get our first drinks. At 8:15, they turned the bright lights on all throughout the restaurant and turned the music up, basically to start telling us all to leave like it was 2am at a bar.

When our appetizer came out, our waiter asked us if we’d be needing anything else that night. We ordered the udon, and it was brought out to the table without noodles in it. When we mentioned it to our waiter, he said that the order error was because the kitchen was “just so tired”; that was at 8:30 exactly. When the correct order was brought out, we didn’t have the right utensils. The rest of the meal was rushed, and the bus person started fully busing our tables, leaning fully over our table and wiping down our table, while we were still working on our last plate. I asked him to please wait until we left before cleaning off our table. For time reference, this was at 8:45.

I understand that restaurants stop taking tables at a certain time, this one 8:30. We called ahead, arrived before 8pm, and received very subpar service from the entire house. I encourage the hosts to say no to customers at 8pm if the experience will be as lacking as it was for us.

They were playing great house music and the quality of food, once received, was excellent. I’m glad the kitchen was not “too tired” to make great sushi. We usually order delivery from here, we’ll probably...