Sakura of Tokyo

Good food, but bad service.

Sakura Sushi is a great little gem of a sushi place tucked away in a strip mill, hardly visible from Route 34. When you walk in, you notice that everything inside is somewhat low budget looking (I mean that in the least sushi-snob way possible). It makes for a great casual place to get your sushi fix, but it's not somewhere i'd go for a first date or special occasion if you're self conscious about that kind of stuff.

The food however speaks well for the establishment though. The sushi is surprisingly fresh tasting, and is affordable with the AYCE. As others have mentioned, the sashimi bits on the sushi were on the thin side and heavy on the rice. it's been that way every time i've been. The Rolls are all delicious, i've yet to be disappointed any anything i've ordered.

Service is attentive, but often on the slow side.

I've only gone for the AYCE, and i can safely say that the best time to go is during the dinner AYCE. even better if it's during the Happy Hour time block (20% off dinner between 3:30 and 5:30). The lunch AYCE is very basic stuff like spicy tuna and california rolls, barely worth the price, where as the dinner AYCE menu by comparison is full-featured with a lot of the premium rolls tossed in for a few bucks more than the lunch price.

If you're looking for a quick, affordable, and most importantly FRESH sushi fix in Naperville, Sakura of Tokyo is your place. I only wish they didn't water down the green tea so much.

Friends. It can mean different things to different people depending on how things play out when you converge. There's work friends, internet friends, family friends, girl-friends, guy-friends, friends with benefits, partner-in-crime friends, drinking buddy friends, old friends, frienemy friends, friends with kids, married friends, single friends, might-end-up-in-jail friends, etc, but I have another moniker for a particularly fruitful friendship between Andres D and I: We're AYCE Friends.

We don't always go out to eat when we get together, but when we do, we ALWAYS go All You Can Eat. Or, AllYouCandiceEat as I like to call it, though admittedly, Andres D picks up a lot of my slack.

So this was both our virgin visit to Sakura of Tokyo... of Naperville, and what had initially caught my eye was a review by Nichole K (follow her on Yelp!), as I know she's got some pretty discerning tastes when it comes to sushi (and beer and spicy food and all good things), and if homegirl says something is 'the best', I pretty much know I won't be disappointed.

So I get there a little early (an anomaly in and of itself) and announce that I'll have another person joining me. The greeter-guy smiles, bangs a gong and tells me to follow him. Why can't everywhere be like this?

So I'm sat at a table across from the sushi bar, it's mostly quiet with only two other tables who finished up shortly after Andres arrives. There's a $14.99 AYCE lunch special, and though I'm not sure exactly what time the menu switches over to dinner, we were there around 2:30/2:45 and they swapped our lunch menu prices for the $19.99 dinner menu, BUT, between 2:30 and 4:30, you get 20% off your entire bill, which came up on receipt as only a little of $15 per person.

Their AYCE menu (and regular menu for that matter) is extensive (read: Menu is two feet tall and about 15 pages long). The AYCE menu includes their regular appetizer menu complete with standard miso, edamame and also udon noodle soup, gyoza, tonkatsu and more! There's a fantastic nigiri menu, a somewhat limited, specialty menu and about two dozen varied regular rolls. The sushi world was at our fingertips!

Andres and I are both miso addicts so we started and finished our meal with bowls of miso, in addition to accidentally ordering a Philadelphia Roll (we thought we'd erased it), some unagi and super white tuna nigiri, a jalapeno spicy tuna roll (LOVED this and it was actually pretty spicy), a spicy California roll, crunch dragon roll, dynamite roll and green tea.

Our service was friendly, though a bit slow, but as a former server, I know how awkward it can be when there's only one table in the entire restaurant and wanting to be there for them, without also pestering them. So our green tea were empty a few times, and I had to do a bit of flagging, but in their defense, I can chug a hot green tea on a cold, windy winter day like none other.

I left super shocked that we were able to get such good quality sushi off an AYCE menu, and that it cost us less than $20 a person, including tax and tip. #SushiSteal