Raw Fish

The restaurant is going downhill. I know you can’t expect a lot in AYCE and I am not a picky person. But the food really tastes bad. The sushi rice was hard and dry. We ordered a fried calamari and it was tasteless. Ordered some pad thai, and it’s just soaked in sauce that tasted funny. They forgot orders. The restaurant started having a smell and it has a dirty feel. I would not go back.

The service was poor, even though the restaurant was empty. The sushi selection was small and didn’t taste very good either. We would never go back or recommend it to anyone.

I LOVE a good Japanese sushi buffet — particularly of the all you can eat variety.
And all you can eat combined with reasonable prices means the house is going to cut some corners someplace to make this an economic proposition.
Well they don’t cut the worst corners at Raw Fish
(the fish is fresh at least) —
but they go places they really shouldn’t be going to get the price down.
the men’s room floor was markedly sticky. sticky as if it had not been cleaned very recently.
the door of the stall literally fell down on my head
(i am not making this up.)
The door had come off its hinges and
no one on the management side could be bothered to go to a home depot,
buy some hinges and screw the door back on the stall.
(this is a job that might have taken ninety minutes start to finish?)
of course i might not have noticed the door if it hadn’t fallen on my head, since the light in the bathroom stall didn’t work.
do you REALLY want to eat raw fish in a place with a dirty unmaintained restroom?
Really?
Miso soup when it came was tasteless.
Now you make miso soup by taking miso and dumping it in water.
This makes miso soup.
You can add other things to it to give the soup body and class — but once the miso is in the water — you are free to call yourself done.
So if your miso soup doesn’t taste like much —
the odds are pretty good that there is not very much miso in your soup —
and you are mostly getting colored water.
Miso is cheap and restaurants get it cheaper than you and I can get it.
So if they are cutting corners on Miso — what else are they cutting corners on?
Well I had ordered a bunch of things before finding the issues with the men’s room and the miso soup — so when the food came I gave it a try.
Fried scallops had the symmetric perfectly honed edges of machine-​made frozen fried seafood. Machine-​made frozen fried seafood is not the end of the world — notably in Korea or Japan where they have some okay suppliers — so the scallop was not awful. But it was a frozen econo-​scallop.
The salad was commercial iceberg mix and the Japanese dressing came out of a bottle. It was edible.
Sushi itself was adequate — with some taste. As good or better than supermarket sushi and I happily chow down supermarket sushi.
But now knowing what the supply line issues were — I was very very careful about what went into the second round.
Cheap suppliers are not to be trusted with fish (although I had ducked a bullet round one) and they are absolutely positively NOT to be trusted with chicken — which is notorious for contamination starting at the production farm.
Frozen vegetables are safe. Cheap beef will be tough but will be otherwise okay.
So round two had beef teriyaki in a hand roll with rice and broccoli tempura.
The broccoli (no surprise) was commercial pre-​battered broccoli but it was perfectly adequate. (Tempura mushrooms probably would have been okay too.)
The beef itself was okay but it was flavored with out of the bottle commercial Japanese teriyaki sauce — used in Japanese and Korean households everywhere but way too sweet for my taste.
Overall, I survived this trip — but this is certainly not an experience that I would repeat.

One of the two best sushi places in saint catharines. Their selection is great, and service is efficient. The best part? Even if half you all-​you-​can-​eat lunch/​dinner is left over, you can get a large bos for $ 3 and take it home with you.

not bad, just soso. I think that East & Wind are better

A friend of mine suggested Raw Fish to me a while ago, and this has been my favourite place in St Catharines for sushi ever since. I’ve been a few times now and it has always been a good experience, but today’s was especially pleasant and makes me all the more loyal to this AYCE sushi joint!
This time my mom and I ordered the green and seaweed salads, kamikaze roll, spicy shrimp tempura roll, beef teriyaki, shrimp and yam tempura, seafood udon, and some spicy sashimi hand rolls. All of the above were absolutely delicious. My favourite part about Raw Fish is that the rolls aren’t huge, and not overloaded with rice. This was the first time I had tried the seafood udon, which I found to be quite good. Although I’m not a fan of the small shrimps so that turned me off from it, however that’s only due to my personal preference.
To end the meal we each had some ice cream and some deep fried milk. Another huge reason why I love this place. Everywhere else you can only get deep fried milk at dinner, and the fact that I can get it at lunch makes me ecstatic! If you haven’t tried it, you MUST! Super delicious.
One thing I have to mention is that normally the service is quite good, but today it was fantastic. I haven’t seen these servers before, but they were so friendly and pleasant. Their hospitality and cheerfulness really made the meal that much more enjoyable.
My only complaint is that I found the music to be a little too loud, but overall Raw Fish is a winner in my books!
UPDATE:
Came here a week or two ago with my mom for dinner, and it was nothing compared to before. I don’t know if they switched cooks or what happened, but the rice was terrible, and there was way too much of it. Also the staff were much less attentive than before. A little disheartening considering the experience I had before… probably won’t be back for a while.

Loved it! My son & his wife took me here on Saturday for an all you can eat buffet & I was so impressed with the tasty food & lovely presentation of it. Very reasonably priced. Service was fast & friendly!

The food was ok. The staff didn’t clear our table after ordering a number of dishes, so the table became quite cramped. They forgot most of our order and when we got served, it wasn’t what we ordered. Last time I’ll be coming here

Went here a couple of weeks ago, and it was nothing to write home about. First, we stood there waiting to be seated for a very long time before anyone bothered with us. Once we got seated it took another long time to get served. We ordered our drinks and food and that took another long period of time to arrive. Once it arrived we were informed that they would be closing in 30 minutes (at 4pm for one hour until 5pm wtf?) because the staff needed a break (!!!) From what I saw the place was near empty and the staff was mostly busy avoiding the customers. I guess that is exhausting if you do it all day. So we were rushed like heck to finish our meal.
The meal itself was decent enough. I’ve definitely had better. But the effort to get served and then get the bum’s rush out the door really invalidated anything good about the meal experience.
We ordered a small dish of ice cream before the 4pm red-​hour and they didn’t bring it. We had to grab the waitress and remind her we had ordered well before the drop dead time. We got a drop-​dead look and a small dish of her anger with the ice-​cream.
On the whole the food is ok, but the side-​dish of bitterness in apathy sauce served up by the staff makes this a never again kind of place for me.

Shortly after this place opened I went here with a group of friends. While we were waiting to get served I read in the menu that Raw Fish was another offering from the folks who have brought us Jade Sushi. After reading that we should have immediately walked back out.
I’ve been to their other restaurants (St. Catharines and Niagara Falls) and have been unimpressed each time… and this was no exception.
The fish didn’t taste fresh, the eel was sliced paper thin, the rice had probably been formed and left out in the open because it was started to get dry. I could go on but basically the food is not anywhere near as good as it should be for the price.