Osaka Japanese and Sushi Restaurant

I have to say I think the management at Osaka took the reviews from last summer to heart, because the experience I had at lunch today was excellent. The service was friendly, as well as helpful; the miso soup very tasty, and the variety and quality of the sushi rolls were very good.
Overall I have to say that we have another high-​quality sushi restaurant in downtown Boise.

Is this place under new management?
The first time I came here was great; good atmosphere, happy staff, great service. But I came last week and what a huge dissapointment! Rude staff, plain uninnovative menu, bad music. I can’t say anything good about this place. Plus I always order Miso soup, its one of my staples to determine the quality of a Sushi restuarant. Not only was Osaka’s soup luke warm, there was no silk tofu and it tasted like burnt toast. Boise obviously has one too many Sushi restaurants.

Came here for dinner on Sunday and really enjoyed the food. The service was a little slow, but the server recognized this and offered to get us a salad or miso soup to hold us over. We declined his offer because we weren’t starving, but it was nice of him to acknowledge the long wait and try to avoid a complaint. The food was really good. We are roll eaters and everything was nicely presented and flavorful. Nothing was overwhelmingly spicy even though we got some roles with Siracha. The restaurant is huge– a very big space for not the busiest of places. I recommend giving it a try.

Went to Osaka on Sunday night; just a few days after its opening. Both my boyfriend and I are huge sushi fans. I travel a lot for work and sushi is usually my staple dinner when out on the road. We ordered the sushi for two, which I usually find to be a great way to determine how fresh the fish is. When fish is all rolled up into rolls with numerous other fixings you lose the taste of the fish. The sushi for 2 consisted of tuna, salmon and yellowtail, my 3 favorite fish to eat raw. The dinner came with a miso soup and salad for each of us, which came out quickly after ordering. The soup was delicious. It had a nice amount of tofu and seaweed in it. The salad was mediocre. It would have been better had they not used iceberg lettuce, also the dressing was a little watery. Anyhow, we were there for the sushi, not the salad so we didn’t think of this as a big deal. Next up was the sushi time. So we waited, and waited and waited. Finally 30 minutes after we finished our salads, the sushi came out!!! It was served on one of those cute little boats, and was garnished well. The fish all looked great, rich coloring, no lines of fat running through it. It just looked nice a fresh. So we took our first taste and YES, it was great. It was the very fresh, soft and melted in our mouth kind of fish. We were very happy with the food once it finally came out. We will give this place another try being they are still in their new opening phase. We are just a little concerned being it was a Sunday, the place was not even half full and the previous sushi place in the same location had a big problem with slow service. We are rooting for you guys Osaka!

Osaka opened for business last night, so we decided to give it a try.
To begin with, the service was outstanding. They had plenty of staff, who were friendly and everyone seemed to be helping each other out.
Two of us ordered Kirin beers in a bottle which were not cold at all. The waitress recognized this right away and insisted upon replacing them with cold draft beers. Apparently, the beers were delivered to the restaurant late and didn’t have enough time to cool. I thought this was a stand-​up thing to do… top shelf.
The food took awhile to come but that is to be expected until they have time to get the kinks out. When the sushi did come it wasn’t very good. I hate to say this about a new restaurant but, it just wasn’t very good at all. For whatever reason none of the sushi appeared to be fresh. Everything seemed to be a bit on the tepid side. The maki were probably the worst I’ve had outside of «grocery store sushi». These pathetic little things were border line anemic. There was nothing brought to our table that was remotely remarkable. A bright note is that the edamami was good.
Man, what a disappointment. I was really rooting for this place to knock it out of the park! The manager DID come out and seemed genuinely interested in the quality of service etc… not sure if he «heard» us on the food issue. We will see.
Great service is clearly a bonus. The reality is; however, that if you don’t have good food, all the great service in the world isn’t going to save you.
I’m going to chalk this up as an opening night tune up and give it one more try… just to be fair.