For a Sunday night, it was very packed, with a full restaurant at one point. The interior of Sakura feels quite warm and comfortable, although the way they have the tables always feels strange. There's a few two person tables in the middle of the room, which just feels strange. The large tables should be in the centre with two person tables on the side of the room I reckon.
The service was prompt and friendly. The older lady, either head waitress or more probably the owner, had a very good memory and remembered everything I asked for.
The problem though is that the food is not great, but worse than that, it's expensive. It's ok to do normal food, but the price should reflect that.
The two salads that we ordered were far from good, and yet cost about $7 each for a tiny bowl. The Marinated Octopus Salad was your stock standard orange coloured octopus with some cabbage. The Fish Roe salad contained no fish roe that I could taste, and was basically coleslaw with heaps and heaps of mayo for $7. We didn't even finish that. Compare that to the Horoki Daikon Sashimi Salad which cost $11.50 and is a wonderfully spectacular dish with fish roe that you can taste flavour when they burst in your mouth. The daikon is dressed in a great tangy sauce and very fresh sashimi as well to give a terrific combination of ingredients. But I digress with the memories, back to Sakura.
The Tempura Udon was quite plain. The tempura batter wasn't lite enough and the udon broth wasn't that good either.
The Yakinini, sliced beef with salad was ok but not worth $17 or something like that. It is something that I could slap together and not worthy of the price I thought.
Finally, I was at least looking forward to the House Platter. It looked good, but again didn't taste that good. The fish weren't that fresh and flavoursome. The sushi was quite bad. The rice was all clumpy and squishy (that's the best description I can think of, the rice had too much water in it) and hence ruined the sushi.
The food came was way too expensive for fairly poor quality food. I would only go there for Friday lunches and the bento box from now. Even that's a little overpriced considering there is a Sushi Sushi down the road now that does a much fresher bento box at almost half the price. So what if the food comes in a plastic box at Sushi Sushi rather than a wooden box at Sakura, it still tastes better and is much cheaper. To add injury to insult, when I got home from Sakura, I had to make a visit to the lavatory. I won't go into details except to say that I have an extremely sensitive stomach and will react to food that's not fresh or cooked with too much msg. So it was one or the other at Sakura that caused my stomach to go funny.
Overall Rating: 9/20, Food is not only plain but expensive too. Only go there if you intend to order the bento box.
Scores: 1-9: Unacceptable, don't bother. 10-11: Just OK,some shortcomings. 12: Fair. 13: Getting there. 14: Recommended. 15: Good. 16: Really good. 17: Truly excellent. 18: An outstanding experience. 19-20: Approaching perfection, Victoria's best.
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