As a starting note, to be completely objective, the food was alright. Some were a hit, others were a complete miss.
The Garlic Beef Fried Rice was the best dish of the night. The beef was tender, rice was fluffy. Unfortunately, the garlic was slightly overpowering. I had garlick-y taste lignering on my palatte for the rest of the evening.
The Beef Udon was alright, average at best. Nothing out of the ordinary that you can't get anywhere else. The udon was well cooked, al dente, which I like. The broth, however, was uremarkable. The egg, you can tell from the photo, was not perfectly cooked. Some of the egg yolk had started to become hard-boiled.
By far the worst dish of the night, and perhaps one of the worst udon dishes I've had in my life. Pork Cutlet Udon in Cold Sesame Sauce: Bite after bite, the udon and pork cutlet were soaked with the sour sesame sauce which was too sour for my liking. I don't know what they put in it.... Vinegar, perhaps? Whatever it was, I couldn't taste any sesame, just vinegar. I did not enjoy this at all, we couldn't even force ourselves to finish half the bowl.
Only thing that was worse than the food, was the service. As a start, the set menu the restaurant promised would be available when my boyfriend made the reservation was not available upon arrival.
The manager stopped by our table to apologize for the miscommunication and offered to give us additional items FOC for the mistake. He then took our order personally.... and thereafter never spoke to us again for the rest of the evening. It might be my imagination, but he did not even come within a 10 ft radius of our table. You would think that the only restaurant manager on that shift should not avoid a good 30% of the restaurant, but he avoided where we were sitting like we were the plague.
I left the restaurant with a lingering sense of displeasure. What the manager did to us was an extremely unethical tactic to pacify us and have us dine at the restaurant when it was the restaurant who clearly made a mistake. A sincere apology would have sufficed. Blatantly lying to our faces to get our business is a pretty low blow for a supposed "upscale" Japanese restaurant.
On that note, the ambience and decor were definitely on point. The restaurant was one of the most spacious I have been to in Hong Kong. The downside was that it was impossible to get the attention of any of the servers. On average it took almost 15-20 minutes for us to get them to serve us, which I do not appreciate considering the service charge. I would definitely not return to Kokomi again.
