Ootoya Japanese Restaurant

[rating:4]

This is a story of wait and triumph. Haha. Well, it’s not really that dramatic, but I thought that sounded sexy.

I arrived at Ootoya slightly early, and I didn’t realize that they were not yet open. However, I stood around outside waiting for my wife. Then I noticed people queueing up for the restaurant, that’s when I looked at the hours and realized that it was not yet open, and these people were lining up for the opening.

I jumped online, and continued to wait. I hate lines, but it was a good thing I got on when I did. I was there well before any of those people, and there were already quite a few ahead of me, and the few minutes after I got on, the line became even more ridiculous. Eventually, my wife showed up, just as we were starting to enter. I said this place better be worth it, I’ve been freezing my butt off standing around out here.

This place is nuts. #nyctalking #ootoya

A video posted by Angel Rodriguez (@angelrdotme) on Nov 7, 2015 at 2:31pm PST

So as you can see from the quick video clip, there was a significant line behind and in front of me. These guys are pretty efficient though, and they had us seated in no time flat. Once seated, our servers took our orders, and things began to move. I was pretty hungry so we ordered two appetizers.

The edamame was, well, edamame. There really isn’t much one can say about that. I simply scraped off the big chunks of salt, and enjoyed the little pods. The tuna was fresh and quite delicious. I’m not sure what exactly that creamy, white stuff was, but being the picky eater that I am, I didn’t experiment.

Next up comes the main dish. I don’t recall the exact name, and this is the problem when I end up waiting a while to write a review, I forget the details. Meh.

Now for some reason this dish took a very, very, very long time to arrive. I will say that it was worth the wait because it was very good, but seriously, this was a super long wait!

My wife had received and eaten her dish while we were still waiting for my dish to show up. As such, I ate some of my wife’s dish, so I will picture it here as an honorary part of my dinner.

She had the yakitori sampler, and that dish was extremely delish! 5 different types of yakitori style meats, hmmm. So good!

Now here is where Ootaya did good by me, and I’m glad they did because the food was good, but that wait was a killer! The servers continued to approach us and let us know that they were sorry, and the dish was being worked on. In addition to that, I believe they had a reservation or something for our table, and we needed to be done by a certain time. Now, we were well within our time limit, but the delay with the dish obviously lengthened our meal. However, we still met the required time, although if we didn’t, you can rest assured that I would not have taken that lying down as it was not our doing. Ootoya provided my wife and I one free dessert to compensate us for the extremely long delay.

The dessert was very good, as was every other dish at this place. Delay aside, this was a nice dinner, and quite a pleasant experience. I’ll come back to this place again.