Takara Japanese Restaurant Ii, Madison, Wisconsin Restaurant Details

Food:

If you like sushi, give them a try. Very good! I love their miso soup!

Food:

I would put this right at average. I've been to some very good sushi places before, and there's certainly a difference. For starters, my heavily accented Japanese server kept asking me "with rice?". And I kept saying "nigiri". And she would say, with rice? And I would say, nigiri. Eventually I just said, yes, with rice. It was somewhat troubling that apparently she didn't know what nigiri was? Also, for as slow as the place was, it took quite awhile for our food to come out. I think in total, between the four of us, there were 6 rolls and 3 pieces of nigiri, and this took over a half an hour for them to prepare.

Food:

The food is polarizing - some like the dishes and others don't. I recommend ordering the dry dishes - sushi, teriyaki, bento, etc. The sashimi is fresh and the bento portions are generous. I highly discourage ordering any of the soups or wet dishes. The udon is the microwaveable type, the sukiyaki is unfortunately sweeter than a Snickers bar, and the glass noodles they use (but shouldn't) sponges up the soup so fast you can see the soup disappearing.

Food:

I used to drag my friends here and we all agreed Takara served good sushi.

But today 8/28/2015 my experience was entirely different. I went alone. They served me below quality spicy salmon, spicy tuna and eel and Avocado sushi with really old fish in all of them. Tuna tasted fish oil, spongy and flaky indicating that it is old. Salmon didn't taste like fish at all. Eel avocado tasted OK.

I told the server about the quality of food. He mentioned he don't have anything to do with it. He told me if I have any feedback I can talk to the sushi makers. Not a manager or even he couldn't pass the message. Wrong people to run a business. They are not open for improvement if they cannot pass a well meant comment to proper channel. A customer shouldn't be bothered with speaking to multiple staff.

Message I get is if I want their restaurant to be improved, better talk to the sushi makers. Why would I want Takara to be improved while Sushi Muramoto serves excellent sushi?

This will be my last trip to Takara. Not only for me. For my friends too.

Food:

My co-worker picked up to go lunch for us. The two roll lunch special is reasonably priced and was delicious. Miso soup is always great, both rolls (eel and avocado, spicy tuna) were excellent. If you're thinking about grabbing grocery store sushi, do yourself a favor, order online from Takara instead. Much better quality and taste! My only complaint, I wish they didn't use Styrofoam containers --please, anything reusable, recyclable, or biodegradable.