Cha-Ya

«Cha-​Ya sucks!» — friend of mine, after asking her if she wanted to get dinner with me in Berkeley.
I didn’t end up meeting with her, but still ended up going to Cha-​Ya anyway. I also didn’t think it sucked.
Shawn C. and I decided to share a combination dinner set, you get to choose 2 a la carte items, we got the nabe (sukiyaki) and a soba roll. It was 25? 26?-ish dollars (from what I can remember) and also comes with a house miso soup and sunomono (cucumber salad). The menu seemed a bit pricy, so the dinner set is definitely a good value.
Overall, we thought it was good. Not amazing, but definitely didn’t suck. I felt 100% guilt free after eating this meal, which is always good! If only I could feel like that after every meal.

Quality is poor. Service was horrible. Save the trip and go somewhere that’s worth your money!
Not visiting again

I met a friend for lunch here because another friend had raved about the food and he wanted to try it. Unfortunately, I was seriously underwhelmed — the dishes I had were bland and way too salty.
My wife tells me that almost no spices are used in most Japanese cuisine so this place was not a good fit for someone like me who loves the worlds of flavor spices open up. And oversalting seems to be an issue with many restaurants I’ve been to – my wife and I use salt sparingly so are pretty sensitive to salt content. I have to say I’m a bit mystified by this problem — if the cook or chef (the latter term would be inappropriate for the person who prepares the food here IMO) uses salt with restraint and it’s not enough for some customers, it’s easy enough for them to add, but if there’s too much salt there’s nothing a customer can do except to not return (and to share his experience on Unilocal!)

Soooo good. This place is great for a quick, casual and supremely fresh meal. My husband and I both got noodle soup dishes and I have rarely seen vegetables coming out looking so fresh at such at casual joint. I couldn’t finish my noodles it was such a large portion. Really a great meal for only $ 11.

We love this place. We are not necessarily vegetarians, but the menu is huge and everything is tasty and we always feel very satisfied when we eat here. Remember to bring cash.
Tonight we had some avocado rolls, buckwheat soba, pot stickers, and tempura. Washed it down with the best green tea. Too full to consider dessert. Service has always been friendly and prompt.

So good!!! The noodles were perfect for a cold evening and the broth was packed with flavor.

Another outstanding place in Berkeley. This place is very creative how they provide their vegan and vegetarian food. This is the only place I know like this in the Bay Area (besides the other one in SF). I ordered the Mushroom Medley with Buckwheat Noodles, the Vegan Roll, and the Vegan Chocolate cake. It’s hard to believe that all of this was vegan and/​or vegetarian. The service was outstanding and I was able to get lunch and eat within 30 minutes. I was worried I would not have enough time with the local parking. Be careful in Berkeley of the ticket monsters! Anyways, the décor was also fine and there was plenty of seating. I also noted that many asians frequent this restaurant which sort of supports the high quality of the food and the very reasonable prices. The only issue I can see is that not all items on the menu would be considered healthy. There are a number of fried food and tempura options so you need to choose wisely. I think some people are fooling themselves by saying they are vegan and the ordering fried and tempura foods. Also, there wasn’t lots of salt or sugar in the food here. That’s a great thing. In summary, a unique place that’s worth a repeat visit for most. Further, it really is a great place for those who aren’t so much into healthy eating, vegan, or vegetarian foods. I’m quite sure that is could satisfy even their tastes. This is not a greasy Chinese or Japanese type of food. I’d give this place a 4.7 star out of 5. A slightly better décor and more healthy food options with less fried options would get it a perfect score.

The quality standards made a come back. There’s an ATM inside the restaurant now, so the cash-​only rule is less annoying. The servers are very nice (as always), and do their best when it’s busy and they’re under staffed.
It’s nowhere near as good as Shizen, but it’s pretty consistent and that counts for something.

This place is absolute crap.
Service was nice but that’s about it (which means nothing if the food sucks).
I ordered 6 different sushi plates, avocado sushi, cha ya roll, this other specialty roll and some other gross crap.
The food tasted so old and disgusting, there is no flavor to it. I think this is my first review that I actually had to go here to warn people.
Even the avocado roll sucked and that’s one of the easiest ones to do.
Not to mention they are cash only and the food is overpriced and sucks. Shizen in SF is 10x better but I came here because Im in Berkeley a lot and wanted to give it a shot.
Never coming back to this place again.

Two vegetarian girls who have no clue how to use chopsticks decided to check out this spot, and had an okay time. I’m not the biggest fan of sushi in general, and I’ve had vegan sushi that has blown me away elsewhere. 3.5÷5 for the food. The service was oddly slow and erratic, and we kept getting different waiters throughout the night. And it’s cash only– never ideal. ³⁄₅ for the service.

I loved the concept of this restaurant; vegetarian Japanese? Heck yeah! My only regret was things took way too long to get to our table. Around 45 minutes from finally placing the order to receiving the food. So I wouldn’t suggest this place if you are in a rush.
But it is a unique experience!

So far I have been sitting here about 20 minutes after ordering and no sign of even my miso I ordered… I am debating on walking out right now…
Now that my entrée has arrived my waitress told me she will bring the miso. As I am sitting here starving I guess I will spitefully wait for it…
The lack of service here is obvious, but now that I have tasted the food I can stand by my rating.
Lunch Order: $ 15
Miso soup and white rice
Stuffed Eggplant

Friendly service and an abundance of choices.
I honestly didn’t think vegetarian food could be this exciting and different. I really loved how it was Japanese food but all vegetarian!
I tried the soba sushi and the vegetable tempura udon noodle while my friend had the vegetable curry udon noodle. The sushi had the best crunch I ever encountered. I loved how perfect the rolls were. The sauce went great for dipping. The veggie tempura was alright, I wish it was a little crunchier but it wasn’t soggy at any means. The broth for my soup went great with the noodles that were prepared just to my liking. My friend’s curry noodle soup base was super tasty. I was very thirsty after I left though :/​
Definitely will be back but will study the menu to make sure I bring more than enough cash :)

They Stayed open late for me and my friend, the staff are super friendly and there is gluten free options with a wide availability of vegan plates.
Really sweet staff. Will come again for sure when there is more time to look at the menu as there was so much on offer. It’s in a great location with lots around and there is lots of seating not available for larger groups.
Only cash!

I’ve been to many vegan/​vegetarian restaurants that have soy protein replace what would normally be meat. Cha-​Ya is not one of those places and I think it’s really one of the biggest selling points for me.
Cha-Ya’s menu is heavily vegetables and it actually tastes good! Their food is authentically vegan food and there isn’t much fake meat going around. I don’t think you need to be vegan or vegetarian to enjoy the restaurant.

Last night I was in Berkeley and had a craving for Japanese vegan food, so my BF and I decided to give Cha-​Ya a try. Cha-​Ya has basic Japanese sushi rolls, soups and dishes but after dining at Shizen Vegan Sushi Bar in SF, Cha-​Ya really needs to step up their game and get more creative with their rolls! One downside is they only take cash but they have an ATM machine inside the restaurant; the impression that I get from this is that they are cheap and don’t want to pay credit card fees, but come on, just about every other restaurant takes credit cards! They lose a star for making payments more difficult and not easy for the customer.
We ordered Gyoza, Garden Roll, Kinoko (mushroom) Udon, and tempura. The gyoza was perfectly crispy on the edges and the tempura was yummy. The udon with the various mushrooms also hit the spot. The Garden Roll was delicious but the roll was huge and immediately fell apart when I tried to eat it.
I appreciate that we have a vegan Japanese restaurant in the East Bay but I think I would prefer to travel a bit farther to go to Shizen Vegan Sushi Bar in SF.

Really negative experience here unfortunately.
I came here with a friend for lunch this past weekend without checking the Unilocal reviews. That was my first mistake. My second mistake was ordering the «Cha-​ya roll» which, as you can see, lists avocado as an ingredient along with asparagus, yam, and carrot. When the roll came out it was completely missing avocado and had cucumber instead of yam as you can clearly see in the photos.
No big deal, it happens, I just assumed that they had delivered the wrong roll to my table, but when I took it back to our server, she INSISTED that there was avocado in the roll and refused to make me what I had actually ordered. I even asked her to point out to me where the avocado was and she just kept gesturing to the roll and saying, «It’s in there somewhere». It wasn’t! How rude!
Even without the order mix-​up, you can see the roll is all rice with almost no vegetables and it’s drenched in their «house sauce» which is a really thick and slimy sweet ginger sauce. I prefer my sushi with soy sauce and wasabi (don’t we all?) and there wasn’t even any wasabi to be found for my roll.
VERY overpriced considering there is no actual fish in any of their sushi.
Rude service and bad food = one star. With all the vegetarian food options in Berkeley, go elsewhere!

Well… I wasn’t impressed.
The idea is cool, but the food just wasn’t so great.
Cha-​Ya Roll– $ 9-​seriously. The tempura was good, but it is potentially carb-​overload. The veggies inside were good. But, it’s passable. Unless you want a vegan tempura roll… Lol.
Vegan Sukiyaki-​$ 11– it was mostly cabbage!!! There were 2 of each veggie (lotus root, carrot slice, peas, broccoli, cauliflower), a few glass noodles, AND TONS OF CABBAGE. Sure the broth was ok, typical udon broth flavor. But the waitress asked if I wanted it to go, but I didn’t have any reason to bring home cabbage in broth. Totally disappointing. Like Top Ramen with cabbage instead of noodles.
Bleh. So overpriced. Plus they charge $ 2.75 for a cup of Barley tea and Bowl’d just gives it out for free.
Crazy.

I think there’s a place for this kind of vegan/​vegetarian Japanese cuisine, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before there’s a place in my stomach for a single $ 9-​$ 15 all-​vegetable «sushi» roll.
I’m sorry, world, but I just can’t.
*Maybe* if that $ 15 veggie «sushi» roll were in some kind of higher-​end atmosphere, but I’m definitely not paying that much for 8 pieces of vegetables in an atmosphere so granola that people around me feel comfortable enough to take their shoes off in the restaurant and put their disgusting feet up on the chairs, then, rub said disgusting and dried up feet together in scratching motions with their long toe nails making that nails on a chalkboard sound. Or when the person across the way feels it is okay to change her baby’s poopy diaper in the dining room.
Nope. That is not the atmosphere that I find conducive to eating any food, let alone $ 15 all-​vegetable sushi rolls.
And I don’t want to go too George Costanza on everyone here, but…
PEOPLE OF THE FIRST WORLD: Please do not take your shoes off inside of restaurants. Please do not change your baby in an enclosed, public area where others are dining directly 7-​feet from where the your spawn’s open, dirty diaper sits. WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY.
Pre-​bare feet scratcher and baby-​changer persons sitting next to/​across from me, I’d decided on a $ 3 bowl of miso soup and an order of the $ 7.95 vegetarian gyoza. I’d had my heart set on getting dessert since it looked like they had quite a few delectable options, but by the time I’d gotten partially through my meal I was pretty much turned off to the idea of any kind of food with the person next to me’s dead skin feet particles and the person across from me’s baby’s poop particles floating off into our shared air everywhere.
I know that the restaurant has no control over the type of clientele they get (re: people who do not recognize that we live in a society), but it was pretty hard to ignore all the uncivilized offenses happening at once. I’m not docking points on Cha-​Ya for this, but it’s something to know before you go since 6 of the 8 tables in the restaurant were all guilty of some kind of violation of the generally agreed upon social norms. It’s equally possible that I dined here on the night of a full moon, or that people who come here are just plain crazy.
My miso soup was really good and had a heartier more veggie-​tasting, mushroom-​tinged broth than any other miso I’ve ever had. My vegetable gyoza were cooked really well, but the gyoza dipping sauce was pretty meh and way too thin to stick to the gyoza when dipped or poured. The filling itself wasn’t super memorable but the little bits of asparagus with that peanut sauce were fantastic… and that’s coming from a person who normally detests peanut sauce and sweet things on savory dishes. This tasted like a summer CSA version of a taffy apple and I can def get down with that.
Service was fine and once I’d placed my order, rather speedy. They are cash only, so be ready with your Lincolns. There was no shortage of menu options, and while I wasn’t terribly excited by a large portion of the items offered, I appreciated the thought and effort they’d put into orchestrating such a varied vegetarian/​vegan-​friendly menu. I know quite a few people who would love to come here and possibly even splurge on those $ 9-​$ 15 veggie rolls, so even though this wasn’t my favorite dining experience for a number of aforementioned reasons, I have a feeling I’ll be back in the future, though I’ll be ready to get sassy if someone opens a diaper near my meal again.

Cha-​Ya is one of my favorite restaurants in the Bay Area! I’m actually shocked that I haven’t already written a review. When I lived in the city I frequently went to the location on Valencia street, but I actually prefer this one. The space feels more intimate and welcoming. It’s definitely worth driving in from Marin to have dinner!
Everything is so incredibly delicious. My go to comfort meal is taku sui, which is clay pot filled with veggies, potstickers, and glass noodles. If you get the lunch special it comes with miso soup and rice (you can also request brown rice). They didn’t used to charge extra for brown rice, but I think they do now. I also love the goma ae and shira ae for appetizers. Yesterday I ordered my usual and my friend got curry soup with soba noodles, which was very good! I think I may branch out and order it next time. We also shared the soba sushi, which was also tasty and the mochi with adzuki beans for dessert. YUM!
If you want to make me happy take me to Cha-​Ya :)