Gen Grill

First time here and I tried the spicy baked lobster roll. It was mediocre… And I found a few pieces of hair on it. Told the workers and they weren’t even phased.
We also tried their chicken curry with brown rice. The brown rice was hard. The chicken was burnt.
My boyfriend had the spicy beef ramen. It tasted like cup noodles.
Disappointed! Not coming back.

I ordered the chicken teriyaki bowl. It was the worst bowl I ever tasted. I would consider flame broiler way better than this. Not eating here again.

This place satisfies my Japanese cravings whenever I’m at UTC. I always get the Chicken Teriyaki, and to be honest, you can’t really go wrong with that. The cashiers are always super nice and friendly.

Ordered the chicken katsu and I was not pleased by it. Everything was poorly prepared. Spinach looked old and not appealing to eat. Basically when I got it and opened my bowl the whole entire meal did not look good. Definitely not ever coming back here again.

Now this place USED to be great, then became good and now it is a restaurant I will never eat at unless I was forced to and/​or someone else is buying :)
My last visit (last night), it was a party of four. There was a host and a hostess who gave different answers to whether we can sit at a booth or not.
The meat source has changed or they are buying much cheaper meats.
Service is only existent with the non-​english speaking busboys. The servers are inconsistent, forgetful, and plainly not doing their jobs.
My table never got few of the meats we ordered, the sauce we asked for, and the soups we asked for.
I would name one server but at least 4 of them were incompetent.

Quality of food has gone worse in the past years.
I use to come here almost every weekend during college and the food here was actually quite good, I would’ve rated them 4 – 5 stars before. However, my most recent experience with them was terrible.
I had ordered a Sukiyaki bowl togo, and at first glance the weight seemed heavy, so I guess I was pretty excited. Upon opening the lid, I realized that the ingredients were extremely meager. I saw 1 leaf of shriveled up spinach, 3 – 4 thin slices (1 – 1.5″) beef, some tofu and vermicelli. The rest was all just rice. On top of that, the food honestly had no taste, as in the sukiyaki taste wasn’t there, it was super bland and just very disappointing.
I don’t know what happened to this place since it was actually quite good before. I’m not sure if I’d go back again, maybe if I was super desperate. But beware… The sukiyaki bowl tastes very bland…

Ordered the UCI roll and I was thoroughly unimpressed. The sushi rice was overcooked and, overall, the roll was pretty bland in flavor. The shrimp tempura inside the UCI roll was soggy — not crispy and warm like I’m accustomed to. The roll was cut into huge pieces, making it challenging to eat (unless you have chipmunk cheeks). If you’re eating at University Center, there are way better food options for a $ 10 budget.

I guess satisfies your Asian-​fix if stuck in UTC/​UCI area.
Quality is meh, and it’s pricey for what you get. My go-​to is the Gen bowl (~$ 7; beef). If I want to change it up a bit, I’ll either get the Sukiyaki bowl (~$ 8; which has beef, noodles, tofu, and some spinach) or the chicken katsu w/​egg bowl.
All bowls have hella rice … and pretty soggy tbh =/​and needs more flavorrrr (I like to go back home and add rice seasoning & sriracha — makes it wayy better). However, they always come out piping hot!
rolls are OK, only get it during happy hour if you must (20% off from 2:30 to 5:30pm)
TIP: use cash if you can
I do hope they stay in UTC tho and not be overtaken by some big name restaurant, just hope they can improve their quality and possibly revamp the place.

Came here looking for another sushi place other than Del sushi. Saw that prices were slightly lower (1 – 2 dollars difference) and decided to give it a try. Honestly, if you want sushi. Go to Del. Just Del. And nothing else. I got the eel special which comes with eel and spicy tuna all over a California roll. Don’t get me wrong it doesn’t taste that bad. But if we were comparing the two, Del would be the better option. The only thing I didn’t like about my meal was how the initiation crab tasted very weird. It had a weird soft consistency. Pretty much tasted like mixing crab and rice to save a couple of bucks. So yeah moral of the story: use that extra dollar and go to Del. Del has bigger pieces as well.
Tip: check in for a free soda!

If you have happy hour… treat your customers to at LEAST 40% off. Here at Gen Grill, you get a whooping 20% off rolls when you come in during their happy hour.
I frequented this place a couple times when I was a no-​car, dorm-​living freshie at UCI. Even from the beginning, I wasn’t really attracted to their rolls. I remember ordering their spicy tuna bowl for $ 7.99 and used my own dry seaweed to roll them into mini sushi rolls… LOL. For the price, I was able to make quite a few DIY sushi rolls so it was an OK investment at that time. However after that year, I never found myself back at Gen Grill.
Today, my boyfriend remembered that Gen Grill had a happy hour and expected to get at least 40−50% off rolls for the happy hour. When we arrived, we were disappointed it was only 20% but my boyfriend decided to go ahead and order a couple rolls. Taste-​wise, they’re really not that bad, but it didn’t really justify the price.
Food also took FOREVER. There was nobody in the store but the two simple rolls took almost 15 minutes. Additionally, they had a huge sign that said «$ 1.99 Spam Musubis» but when I tried to order them, they said they «ran out for the day».
Overall, not a great experience and it’ll probably be another few years before I step back into Gen.

I ordered the chicken udon with added California roll. I highly recommend getting it especially during the winter time. The broth is very tasteful and cooked just right. ⁵⁄₅ for me.

Sushi rice taste and texture is weird. Fish taste kinda old. Costumer service is sweet. But food is yuck. I had to throw some of it away because I couldn’t force it down even tho I was hungry /:

This place serves very good Japanese food and is located in University Town Center, across from UCI. I usually order their combination plates, which is a pretty good deal (6.99 for 1 item entrée or 7.99 for 2 item) then you can add on some rolls for $ 2 extra!
Really good deal if you’re looking to munch on some casual Japanese food. The cashier even hooked me up with extra katsu sauce for my food. Because I really like extra katsu sauce. If you’re looking nice for a quick to-​go Japanese food place, come to Gen Grill. But obviously if you’re going to want some super high end fancy Japanese experience, look elsewhere.

I was craving sushi. Again. Actually… I can’t really think of any instance when I’m not craving sushi… but anyways, decided to try this place. I had the snow cone roll with albacore, the baked salmon roll, and the veggie roll. My eyes were obviously much bigger than my stomach because I couldn’t finish all of it, but aahh sooo good! Very good flavor and sauces, and the fish was cooked just right.

In the good ol’ college days (all of two years ago), I would crave a curry, chicken katsu bowl from Gen Grill. Then, it was on the list of things to eat if you were a UCI student. And I ate plenty of these bowls during late nights with friends.
Since graduating, I’m not in the area much anymore. Recently, I was visiting a friend, hanging out in UTC, using the free WiFi, when I remembered these beloved bowls. So I got the chicken katsu bowl to go and a rainbow roll.
Surprisingly, the sushi was okay. I was expecting it to be horrible, and with expectations like that, I wonder why I even ordered it… But, hey, my sushi compass dgaf. Anyway, once I got my chicken katsu, I opened the lid and was met with steam. The bottom is rice, then topped with the katsu, then layered with steamed egg and onions. I opted out of the curry, by mistake, but I don’t think it would have mattered, in this case.
Now, my problem here is the lack of texture. Soggy steamed onions, mushy sweet egg, soggy katsu from the steam and then… rice. There wasn’t any crunch to help balance out the bowl. It was like eating katsu-​flavored baby food. Even if the chicken HAD been crispy, I would have never known. Also, if there was curry, the rice would have been soggy as well, and, yeah, down hill from there.
Besides texture, the taste is also underwhelming. The katsu is good, but the amount of sugar in the egg is just WAY too much; some people I know like sugar in their egg, but I definitely do not, especially when I’m craving a savory food like chicken katsu.
If I’m in the area, MAYBE I’ll come around and try it out again; it’s hard to kill old habits… and it’s even harder to give up that deep-​fried guilty pleasure.

I’ve walked past this place probably a hundred times and never bothered to check it out just because I guess I assumed, since they serve sushi, it was probably some expensive restaurant that wasn’t suitable for a broke college student lol. Well not expensive expensive, but just on the pricier side. But last week my friends and I decided to go check it out cus we were craving udon. We were surprised at the price, only $ 5.50 for a regular udon and $ 6 for chicken udon! I thought it was pretty good, although the broth was a little on the sweet side. You also have to put A LOT of the chilli powder if you want to taste it at all and kinda stir your soup while you’re eating cus it all floats down to the bottom but that pretty much happens all the time with chilli powder so it’s whatever. The chicken they use is the same as what they use to make teriyaki chicken. My friends and I decided to go back today and were surprised to see that all the prices went up by 50 cents since the last time we were there, which was literally only a week ago but whatever it’s just 50 cents. I initially wanted to order the spicy ramen but my friend stopped me by saying you could literally see boxes of shin ramen in their kitchen. Bruhhh, if y’all are gonna use shin ramen and try to sell it for like $ 5, you need to go lol, and at least try to hide it better if you’re gonna do that. I decided to look this place up on Unilocal to see the ramen pictures and sure enough, looks just like shin ramen LOL. But anyways, I ended up ordering the regular udon, but this time it just wasn’t as great. The noodles were kinda too hard and super chewy and the broth still had that weird sweetness to it. I’m not sure why it seemed so much better to me the first time, probably just cus I hadn’t had udon in awhile and was craving it but this time, it just didn’t hit the spot for me. I’m most likely not going to be back.