Monday, October 20, 2008

Mayorga Becomes Nori - For Now

The other day, I noticed Mayorga had officially become Nori - an Asian bistro. After checking out some reviews on Yelp - mixed to positive - The Heights Life ventured over to decide for ourselves.

The decor hasn't change, but a slightly fishy smell now permeates the place. We were seated in the dining area with the long bench below the bar. You can also sit at the sushi bar where they used to pour coffee. It was clean and cozy inside with a decent crowd for a Sunday night.

Everyone was friendly, but the servers seemed inordinately stressed. They had two people covering the dining room, and apparently that's not enough. It wasn't that the service was slow, it was that several things just never showed up until we asked - then they appeared right away.

As for the for the food - standard rolls were around $5, special rolls were $7 to $10, soup was $3, sushi combos ranged from about $15 to $20, and entrees centered around $12.

Our review will have to fall into the "mixed" category. The gyoza appetizer tasted homemade and delicious. The miso soup was good. The salad was standard, but probably not even worth $3.

The rolls, however, confused us. We ordered one spicy tuna, and one spicy tuna without the roe it normally comes with. The roe-laden roll was overwhelmingly fishy and in a very bad way. After one bite neither of us wanted to finish it. The tuna sans roe was fine - not great, but decidedly better than the roe roll. We also tried one of their twists on classic (American) sushi - a baked California cream roll, which was good.

ArtBart attempted to order inari - normally a bean curd pocket with rice. What they brought out was a seaweed wrapped six piece roll with rice and a tiny bit of bean curd in the middle. It was not good.

We might go to Nori again if sushi desperation hits and we can't get U Sushi to deliver... but I think I am more likely to hold out until Sake Club opens - even if it will cost more.

Our guess - Nori will be just another rotation in what should be a great space for something.

PS - ArtBart wants me to add that the noodle dishes that came out of the kitchen looked great. We didn't try those - so maybe we'll have to go back. Anyone else dined at Nori? Leave a note in the comments section.

4 comments:

leetucker said...

They serve an inari roll as well as regular inari. The regular inari are very good, a little sweeter than some other places but with a nice flavor and texture.

My girlfriend and I went yesterday and also found the service to be rather frazzled. Presumably that will improve with time. However, we found the sushi to be solid overall, not as good as Sushi Taro or Kotobuki but otherwise at least as good as any of the other moderately priced sushi places around town (ex. Tono Sushi).

We'll be back for sure.

Anonymous said...

Ah ha! Guess we just ordered the inari wrong. Thanks for the note.

Anonymous said...

I had the drunken noodles, they were nothing fancy but they were fresh and spicy and very tasty.

I echo the comments about the service; front of the house acted like the place was on fire the whole time, and we had to repeat every request two or three times before it happened. But the kitchen seems to have its act together.

Anonymous said...

we went on Sunday evening as well and were pleasantly surprised. The salmon and spider roll were really good, as was the spicy tuna (ours didn't come with roe, which we noted), the scallops weren't the best and the eel was ok. We'll be going back to try the sushi bar because the service was a little nutty as you mentioned.