Horinoya - Long Review...

Morning All,

Went to Horinoya on Saturday night for an early Valentine's Day dinner - I called the hostess in advance to see how parking would we with the parade nearby, and she wasn't exactly much help, and a bit on the gruff side - which is unusual for Japanese folks in my experience.

When we got there, the place was completely empty. Same hostess couldn't smile, say hello, or "Table for two?", but we got a rough "Can I help you?" instead.

Thankfully, our waitress was much, much nicer.

So, in the spirit of wanting to try a whole bunch of stuff, we chose a few appetizers first, the fried oysters with ponzu (I think?) sauce, and something that sounded intriguing called "Mountain Potato".

The oysters were excellent, no doubt about it.

As for this mountain potato thing, it is the biggest waste of $7 you can possibly imagine. It's basically a pile white shreds of (I guess?) potato, that are slimy and 100% tasteless. The next table with people asked the waitress to describe it, and she couldn't give them an answer! We were trying to signal to them to not order it, but...

For our main stuff, we chose the deluxe sashimi and two orders of the passion rolls, since someone here raved about the latter.

There was some outstanding fish in the deluxe sashimi - some of the best I've ever tasted, but it's a ripoff for $42.

It was probably 12-15 small pieces total, along with squid and octopus (3 pieces each). No idea why they felt the need to include squid and octopus, but I sure as hell would have preferred more yellowtail, salmon, etc.

When we ordered the passion rolls, the menu mentioned that they contained "no rice."

So I'm naturally thinking that it'll be more fish than you get in the average roll. What they didn't tell us was that they're wrapped in cucumber - so the cucumber overpowered whatever fish was in there. For 8-10 pieces that cost $27, this was very, very disappointing.

At this point, we were still hungry, so we ordered the crunchy roll, plus the eel/avocado roll, along with beef negimaki.

Both rolls were great, and were a very reasonable $6. Beef negimaki was a little strange with all the onions inside, and we were full at this point, so we didn't finish it.

One small Sapporo, one soft drink, and one iced tea plus the stuff above came to $150 with tip for a dinner that was a little longer than an hour. It just didn't feel like much of an experience for the money spent.

Service from our waitress was great throughout.

So maybe we just picked a lot of the wrong stuff. I'll go back for rolls and individual sashimi at some point, and that'll probably be a lot more satisfying.