We had Valentine's dinner at Kabuki in Valencia and the experience was "good" but not great.
I had a Kabuki Old Fashioned which on paper looked delicious, Whisky, Japanese black sugar...but in the glass it was no more special or distinctive than any other Old Fashioned I'd had. It was a blend of Maker's Mark Bourbon with a Japanese Whiskey. I like Maker's Mark but at a "high end" Japanese restaurant that I'm spending a lot of money on a cocktail for, go ahead and please use the nice Japanese Whiskey. Also the "Japanese Black Sugar" I was hoping would be a noticeable special ingredient and it was not.
That having been said we really liked what we ordered to eat. We're vegetarians and there was also a little bit of a disappointment that some vegetarian items on their website menu didn't seem to be present on the in-store menu. Still, we did have choices and our server let us know about one item that wasn't on the menu, a Crispy Tofu roll which was a vegetarian take on a crab-cake roll. It was good.
We also liked the "Green Roll." Nicely presented and tasted good too.
We also shared the Curry Rice Bowl...I was lucky enough to still have a memory of having curry in Japan and the taste of this definitely reminded me of that experience. That's part of what one can hope from food...that it'll transport you to another place in your memory. Eating good food luckily can be like traveling. That just about happened here with this curry dish.
We'll probably try other places before we come back, but we'd comeback.
