The Miniblog

Restaurant Review: Japonais

Well as part of my birthday weekend celebration, we trekked over to the newly opened Japonais New York restaurant and Lounge at 111 E 18th St. in the Union Square area of Manhattan.

I had walked by the restaurant a number of times while the space was under construction and was intrigued enough to make a mental note to return when it opened.

From the outside one can see a great attention to detail in design and construction. I was impressed with the hard wood veranda area outside, with the resplendant giant plants. The interior was dark and oh so trendy and hip. Very Union Square cool, if you know what I mean.

So how was the food and service? Well the food was good without being amazing. I mean the prices are expensive, but considering the neighborhood it is in and the clientele they are likely to have it's nowhere near over priced. That said, I don't think it's a good value for the dollar, not yet, at least with what we ordered.

We started with a salad, and as you can see in the picture above it was, um, lettuce and some dressing, and three hair thin slices of cucumber and tomato. I mean, the lettuce was fresh and the dressing had a nice flavor, but this wasn't anything to write home about, or write in a blog about.

The wife had the tuna, which was recommended by the wait staff:

Again, the flavor was decent, but the fish itself was a bit fatty. Presentation was interesting, although the giant prawn head didn't really make it that much more appetizing.

I went for the filet mignon, which honestly was nothing special. I mean it was a nice cut of meat, prepared well, although the sauce they used to accompany the steak was far too bitter and acidic and frankly ruined it for me. For a few dollars less you can get a filet mignon over at Lan on third avenue that beats this hands down for quality and taste. It was plated on top of rather lackluster whipped potatoes. The presentation was helped only by how dark the dining room was.

We also had a miso soup, which was good without being great, and a crab roll appetizer, which was surprisingly tasty - which leads me to believe that the sushi here might be very good, but we'll have to check that out on a return trip.

For dessert we ordered some kind of chocolate surprise, which featured three dishes with yes, you guessed it, chocolate. A mousse, strawberrys with a chocolate flan, and what seemed like donut holes with a rich, flavorful chocolate center. And I got a candle and a waitress sung rendition of "Happy Birthday". Nice.

The service was good, but a bit overbearing throughout the meal. That's better than having bad service of course, but I felt too many different people hovering over us. I'll chalk that one up to the fact that a) it's newly opened and they're trying to make a good impression, and b) we were there before the dinner rush really kicked in, so you had a lot of staff milling about with quite a number of empty tables.

I was most perplexed when a busboy came by and used one of those bread crumb scraper things to clear the table after we finished the soup and salad. Since there was no bread or anything that would of produced crumbs or other table refuse I was unsure as to what exactly he was scraping off the tablecloth, and it was annoying having to lift our wine glasses and such off the table for him to do that.

In conclusion, the place holds promise, and the food is solid as representative of the dishes we had, but nothing really had that "wow" factor or seemed to justify the prices. We'll go back in a few months and see how things are.

Oh, the wine list was excellent, as were the wines we ordered. And the interior was very classy. The lounge area was tres cool, and you might just find me holding up the bar there over the rest of the summer.

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