Sushi Sakai

The ambience seemed pretty good. Very warm lighting and some quiet modern Korean /Japanese music in the background. Initially served ice water with a wedge of lemon and with black cotton napkins instead of paper. I tasted all the food my party had and I thought was great. I personally had the katsu so that's what I can grade the most. The katsu sauce served with it is not really a sauce, but more like a gravy. It also distinctly had tomato flavor that I thought was great. I wished they served more of that sauce on the side to dip more. Finally, for the price I wish I had a little more katsu and rice because this barely filled me up. The grilled saba ( mackerel) and yellow tail were all juicy and had a great smokey grilled flavor. I preferred the mackerel slightly more. The Korean style wings were also very tasty and spicy. The orange chicken, for being a Chinese American dish at a Asian fusion restaurant, was pretty good. However, it did have a legitimate orange flavor like they actually used oranges in it, which I liked, but people only used to Panda won't really care for. I can say that their crunch game for all fried items was on point, everything fried was crunchy. Edit #1: Changed 4 stars to 5. Went again recently and was fantastic. I really enjoy all the bento box combos we had for dinner. Edit #2: So I got to try the katsu dish again, and it seems they changed the sauce they give with it to something new compared to my previous review. For me the newer sauce was super average, nothing about it stuck out to me in terms of flavor.

Recently they installed a grill so they can serve Korean BBQ and that's why I came. It's not in the menu, but it's $50 for two people. Reservations are strongly recommended because they only have one table for this. For the KBBQ, you get a place of meat not marinated, an egg souffle thing that is delightful, ban chan and rice. It's also accompanied with some sauces. Overall, I enjoyed the experience and the food was tasty! The experience was fun and the service was really nice! I'm giving four stars because the menu is ginormous. I'm also not crazy about the sushi and this is based on eating at all of their locations (here, Gonzaga and the valley when they used to be there). I feel like the rice to fish ratio is off for me, the fish is ok (it's by no means bad) and sometimes the rolls are loose. Again, it's not bad sushi; I just prefer to go elsewhere for that, but I'll come back for the KBBQ!