Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Kabuki, Farmington Hills, Dearborn and Canton, MI


Kabuki is a well-known Japanese restaurant in the metro Detroit area. Although most of their orders are sushi, they do serve a wide variety of Japanese and Korean dishes, excluding sushi. I have had experiences at each of their two locations and the restaurant in Farmington Hills is by far, much better. I first experienced Kabuki at their Farmington Hills location and enjoyed it very much. My party and I were seated quickly and not served for about 5-10 minutes. After we got a waitress, we were immediately brought ice water and complimentary miso soup and from then on, the service was very, very good. The miso soup and the seaweed salad (which we ordered on our own) were excellent. One suggestion is to not eat all of the seaweed salad until you are done with your sushi, if you get sushi. The salad acts as a pallet cleaner, especially if you dislike the taste of ginger. After our soup, we ordered a rather large order of sushi for three people: 1 dragon roll, 2 East rolls, 1 shrimp tempura roll, 2 California rolls, and 3 spicy crab and shrimp rolls. I believe the spicy crab and shrimp roll is a specialty roll, but I have seen variations at other sushi bars, like O'Sushi. Our sushi was served on a wooden boat that fit on our table. It was an impressive serving platter, but it seemed you had to order enough sushi to fill the boat. Surprisingly enough, we managed to eat most of the sushi we ordered, solely because it was excellent. I have had other sushi from a variety of places before and none have been as fresh as the sushi that Kabuki served us. We eventually left, full to the brim and completely satisfied.

Sadly, I cannot say that the Dearborn Kabuki was as impressive as the one in Farmington Hills. First of the all, the Dearborn Kabuki's waitstaff are nowhere near good at what they do. My family and I were seated qucikly when we went, but were not served until we asked to be served, which was about 15 minutes thereafter. We ordered drinks from one waitress and ordered food from another...very confusing and frustrating. we ordered a variety of foods, sushi, chicken, and tempura. The timing of serving the food was terrible. The people that had ordered the chicken and tempura finished eating before I was served my sushi. The chicken was tough and dry, and the sushi we ordered had been sitting up on the sushi bar with about 4 other plates of sushi for 15 minutes. After the chicken and tempura were served, we hadn't seen our waitress for nearly 20 minutes. And when she came back, all she asked us was if we would like more water; she could have at least updated us about our sushi, that for no apparent reason was sitting on the sushi bar rotting away with the other orders of sushi. We eventually got our sushi, but didn't see our waitress until she did us the fine favor of giving us the bill. After that, she never even came back for the bill, so we gave it to the waitress who served us our drinks. The sushi was not bad; the avocado was warm and the rice was dry, which was not appealing to our stomachs, but we ate it nonetheless.

Kabuki is currently in the process of building a new location in Canton, MI, and hopefully they can improve service there in order to keep customers coming back. The below picture is my favorite roll, the spicy crunchy shrimp and crab roll:

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