Gasho Japanese Steak House

We went to Gasho  last night to celebrate my nephew's birthday. I have been to Gasho many times to celebrate special occasions with family members over the years,often having a wonderful experience.
I had not been to Gasho in a couple of years and I was very disappointed in our recent visit. The interior looked dingy,paintings on the wall were hanging askew, and  the restaurant was relatively empty. Our waitress was dour and appeared to want to be anywhere else ,but where she was. Service was slow despite the fact the restaurant was  less than half full.
The " show" the chef put on was stilted and clearly routine.The food was saltier than I recall and overall was disappointing.When I made the reservation,I specifically informed  Gasho that this was a birthday celebration and  I wanted to make sure the  birthday boy got a happy birthday song in Japanese,which had been the practice in the past. Not only did I have to request the birthday song when our dinner was almost done,but it was an extremely anemic English rendition...what a letdown!
I brought my daughter to Gasho for every birthday for ten years because of the effort and enthusiasm that was bestowed on the celebrant( the entire wait staff would sing a Japanese version of Happy Birthday,provide the guest with a Polaroid picture marking their celebration at Gasho....it was such a warm,inviting environment that it became an on going tradition to celebrate here.
It is sad to see how every aspect of the dining experience at Gasho deteriorated from dingy interior,dour and disinterested staff who were clearly just going through the motions,to supervisory / management staff who appeared equally uninterested in the quality of their customers dining experience.
It is a shame to see a place that I have had so many wonderful experiences lose it's mojo! I hope someone in a position to turn Gasho's current  lackluster functioning will read these comments and help return it to the memorable standing. I doubt I will be back and I surely will not be taking anyone here to celebrate a important moment,because the current venue is not worthy!

Gasho is an ugly American's 1970's vision of what them 'Chinee folk - I'm sorry - them Japanee folkses eatin place should be.  It has the obligatory zen garden, along with the tourist-safe cuisine selections happily swimming in butter as well as other heavily flavored sauces to appeal to the American palate.

There was such a lack of places to eat in the area that we stumbled into this place and between the four of us, we had the filet mignon, the scallops, the shrimp, and some beef/chicken combo.  I do have to say that the scallops and the filet were very tender, but at a certain point we got sick of the heavily buttered and salted-to-the-point-of-being-tasteless shrimp and other meat selections.  

I guess it's been some time since we have been to a teppan yaki grill like this, as it's really for kids and tourists - and we watched in amusement as the chef threw on healthy dollops of butter (or was it margarine - sh*t doesn't matter, I guess) to everything from the fried rice to the shrimp.

On the plus side they do give you big buckets of soda - like 7/11 Big Gulp monstrosity size to wash down the salt and butter.

Awesome place for Japanese food!