Sushi Rock

WHAT THE HELL, SUSHI ROCK?!
Went here today. And. The. Service completely sucked.
Waited for 20 minutes. No waiter came to our table. NONE. Not even water service.
We just sat, looked at our menus, and chatted. The only reason we came was because Pacific East opened at 3, and we didn’t realize that. However, after about killing 20 – 30 minutes at Sushi Rock, waiting for a freaking waiter to come by, we LEFT.
WE GOT UP AND LEFT. WALKED OUT THE DOOR. The service is awful! I’ve had better service at Applebee’s. Seriously. DO NOT GO HERE. Go to Pacific East instead. Food comes out fast. It’s fresh. It’s LEGIT SUSHI.

I was invited by someone who knows her sushi, She maybe my equal and or more awesome than I, on many levels. We had to be mindful that we were ordering for a person who has not eaten much uncooked fish. A couple of other challenges were, that the newb did not like salmon, and we do not like eel.
We ordered several large rolls and regular makis that had a variety of cooked and uncooked fish. We unfortunately did not order a ton of sashimi due to the newbie factor. The fish to rice ratio was not as high as I prefer.(like some places that are on the corner of Mayfield and Coventry)
Tip — when ordering sushi and the rice spirals around the fish, it may look cool, but that means you are eating a sh*t ton of sushi rice!
Manhattan roll had more avocado than tuna! WTF, if I wanted that much avocado I would have ordered chips and guac! Well I might be embellishing a bit! However, for 7 bucks more FCUK’n fish please.
The roll with softshell crab with other things was off. I ate one piece and something tasted funny. When rolls are made lots of different ingredients and sauces, its a bit more challenging to enjoy the simplicity of sushi. Anyhow, I approached my second piece and started to sample the contents of the roll and found something was bad, I asked my counterpart to taste the ingredient that I suspected was bad, and she agreed as well. The manager promptly removed the item and offered to replace it with another Item of our choice. The manager removed this item from our bill and handled this situation as professionally as possible.
The rest of the dinner went with out incident. Our server was incredibly attentive and friendly. The water glasses never reached empty. I was pleasantly surprised that there were some people whom had worked at Mallorca are now at the «Rock»
Some of the other rolls which I can not remember the names of, but had things like shrimp tempura, spicy sauce, mayo and some veggies, were quite tasty, our newbie, lets call him Joe, enjoyed the other large rolls as well.
Joe who claimed to not like salmon enjoyed the Alaskan (salmon and avocado) quite a bit. The salmon was very fresh, it melted like butter upon the «Chew».

Sushi is OK. This is the greasy, club hopping version of a sushi restaurant. There are way better options in Cleveland. Quit being a wuss and find em!

I’m not exactly sure why Sushi Rock receives so many bad ratings in regard to the taste of food. I’ve patronized both the Downtown and Beachwood locations dozens of times since 2009. Only once has the sushi been less than delicious (it was very dry and tasteless.) I’d say that’s a pretty good track record. I’ve dined at sushi restaurants all over Northeast Ohio, and had sushi prepared by first class sushi chefs. Sushi Rock is one of my favorites.
I generally order Crabstick Salad Maki, Kani Su, Eel Maki and Kani Nigiri. Everything is always fresh and delicious, which is what you want when eating anything raw (Eel and Kani Nigiri.) The rice to fish ratio is always excellent, and I’ve never had sushi with too much rice.
I’ve never ordered any of their other food, so I can’t offer an opinion either way.
Yes, it’s loud, which is very annoying. Yes, the service usually sucks, especially Downtown. Yes, the place is full of douchebags on most nights. These reasons are why I knocked my rating down to 4-​star. I’ve found that sitting upstairs (Downtown) greatly reduces the volume, and you can hold a somewhat normal conversation. The service is truly terrible at both locations. Examples include taking forever to receive your sushi, waiting forever for drink refills, snotty hostesses, clueless waitresses and not receiving napkin/​chopsticks/​soy until 20 minutes after the sushi arrived.
I always go on Tsunami night (Wednesday Downtown & Thursday Beachwood,) to ease the pain. When I’m only paying $ 3.25-$ 4.50 per roll, the horrible service and general atmosphere can be overlooked.
Parking is a breeze in Beachwood, where you can park in the garage or in the lot right in front of the restaurant. Downtown is a slight pain, with on-​street parking your only option, or valet.
Now I want sushi.

Please don’t go here. I went with a large group for dinner on Saturday. I love sushi, and I already knew I wasn’t a fan of Sushi Rock, but they managed to lower my opinion even further. Absolute worst service I can imagine. We had at least 5 different servers (consecutively, not dividing the group to make it easier). Never took our drink orders. Had to ask at least 4 times to get a water refill. Forgot our appetizer completely, after we had placed/​reminded the order with 4 different people. The rolls are like 3″ in diameter so it’s completely impossible to eat them like sushi is meant to be eaten, and they totally fall apart when you pick up a piece. Everything is swimming in mayo, even when we asked for it on the side. Disgusting. The bathrooms were filthy and broken.
On a positive note, they did take some things off our bill to compensate for forgetting them, and they were willing to accomodate our large and noisy group during prime weekend dinner time, which can’t be said for all restaurants.

Wednesday is «Tsunami Night» and an absolute must! All the Sushi and Maki rolls are half off; you just can’t beat that! I’m no sushi expert but I split a plethora of different rolls with a friend of which each and every bite delivered nothing but absolute satisfaction. I was full after two rolls but couldn’t stop myself from eating more.
The service was exceptional and extremely efficient.
Note: You will probably want to make a reservation as it can get pretty busy and the restaurant is not all that big to begin with.

It’s hard to imagine a time when I’m not in the mood to get my sushi on, but this night I just wasn’t (could have been those 3lbs of Melt’s cheese sandwiches I threw down at lunch, you say? Stop judging.). I opted for some edamame and a small cucumber/​avocado roll, but I witnessed 11 of my other friends destroy ornately designed roll after roll, «Mmm”-ing with every bite.
Our service was a little slow — we waited nearly 10 minutes after our rolls were brought out for soy sauce. They probably should have had one more person helping him, especially when the food came out, but overall it was good food and a fun time.
They take reservations and can accommodate large groups!

Came here with a large group and even though they stuck is in the back room by ourselves, it was probably better that way. My friends got all sorts of things on the menu, and everyone seemed to enjoy their meal. I got a spicy tuna roll and a larger roll topped with crab and a spicy sauce, and it was delicious. The prices were fair for a large roll, but I thought that the more «generic» rolls like spicy tuna and California were severely tiny.
That seems to be the case though sometimes at nicer sushi places. I don’t quite understand it though. I get that $ 5 for a roll isn’t going to get you much, but I would think that it could get you more than 6 of the smallest, finger-​sized pieces.
But I digress. Sushi Rock was still a better than your average sushi place, with a wide variety of rolls that my friends were able to share and sample together.
I almost forgot, we shared a bottle of cold sake for around $ 18 – 19. I’m not that into cold sake, but my friends wanted it so I went along with it. It was one of the better ones that I’ve had, although for me if you’re doing sake, get it hot!

They get the 4 stars because of one thing… KANI SU. Why it is so hard to find this anywhere (asking the sushi chefs even has not yielded it) is beside me, but I wish more places had it on the menu and were willing to make it. I mean, how hard is it to wrap Crabstick and Avocado in cucumber? My husband (before we were married) had resorted to buying a yanagi knife and learning to make it for me (which yielded him 10 stars in my personal opinion, and led to me marrying him).
The specialty rolls are good, and large! I loved the Rock and Roll.
Generally decent and fresh, we were usually pretty happy here (same can be said for Beachwood… although I think Beachwood actually had better service).

My first meal in Cleveland, and I am only half impressed.
After a slow start (it took seven minutes for a waitress to even come to our table to say hi), we ordered the vegetable roll, salmon roll, and lettuce wraps. After insurmountable amount of time waiting, we finally got our appetizer (Seriously, how long does it take to put some already cooked chicken in sauce and then place it on lettuce wraps?). The chicken and lettuce wraps were a little too heavily marinated, and I had to brush off the sauce from the chicken in order to avoid sodium overload.
The vegetable sushi roll was humongous! It was twice the size of the usual sushi I get from Japanese restaurants. But it was absolutely delicious: crisp, juicy, and generous in amount, the vegetables really danced in my mouth. This was definitely the highlight of the meal. A five would be given just for this portion.
We also got the smoked salmon roll, which was equally as big. The glob of mediocre cream cheese really did hinder the flavor from the surprisingly fresh salmon. The kiwi on top of the roll worked, but there was overall a lack of flavor on behalf of the whole roll.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the Japanese American fusion nature of this restaurant. It felt like a party/​bar that really wrecked the calm ambiance of Japanese classy sushi. I’m a big advocate for authenticity; fusion works occasionally, but in my opinion, not this time.

I’ve been to Sushi Rock a few times and the service has deteriorated, as has the food.
We went to a late lunch, early dinner at 4pm. We were the only customers. Service at first was okay but we ordered and she came back four times to ask us what we ordered and questions about what we had ordered. Once we had gotten our food we had to bring to her attention that she forgot one meal… she hadn’t rung it up. A lot of forgetting.
The food: The sushi was okay but contained about three times as much rice as sushi normally does. The big rolls are seriously three bites of food that are next to impossible to stick in your mouth all at once. I order the Geisha roll with the sweet sauce on the side. My reasoning being I don’t like sweet with dinner, I wanted spicy. I am so glad I did because the sauce reminded me of spaghettio sauce. Ew.
I also ordered a spicy tuna roll, my complain is only that it had too much rice. Also shared edamame which was fine and miso soup with was really good. My sister also always gets the Sushi rock shrimp and it is always so good, just fried.
Lastly, more service woes… I asked for more water (when I truly believe you should never have to ask for more water) and she filled my completely empty glass with room temperature water, no ice. Seriously? At this point there was still more staff than customers so I don’t understand. Our waitress seemed to be bartender and waitress to the whole restaurant and she wasn’t handling it very well.
I thought the sushi was reasonable at $ 13 for the big roll and about $ 7 for the spicy tuna but others I was with called this «big city pricing.»

Half price sushi Wednesdays is amazing. I love the choices, the atmosphere, and the service. It was not as crowded as it was last time, major plus. Besides I got about 40 pieces of sushi for less that $ 35, pretty cool right. I say try it out, it’s a really nice date night place

Went here with a group of friends for Happy Hour. They have a great menu of food including sushi for $ 4 and they also had martinis. I think we tried every martini of theirs that were for the price. There were 4 of us. We had the creamsicle, cosmopolitan, lemonade stand, and something else. The bartender was very attentive and nice. I ordered my first drink and told her that I liked something with mangos, and so she made something with that. I think any bartender that comes to accommodate their customers deserves a star.
The place is very chic and modernized. Great place to hang out and great location on W.6^th. They also have a 2^nd floor which I didn’t get to check out but the crowd at that time were people like us who just got off of work and it was time for some great happy hour!
I’d come again.

I love sushi, and maybe I’m a little bit of a snob about it living in California for 11 years. But I just can’t get down with this place after trying it a couple times.
The sushi is cut very thickly and has a very bland taste. Which I guess is better than a fishy taste, but it’s just not good on the palate. Maybe it’s the distance the fish has to travel. But I’ve been to a couple other sushi places in Ohio and they were a lot better.
It’s probably in part the sushi chef’s knife skills. It seems like it’s trying hard to be cool. It misses the mark for me.

We had a friend visiting from out of town a few weekends ago who wanted a good steak and sushi. We aren’t huge sushi fans, though we have eaten at Sushi Rock a few times (and have heard pretty good things about their steaks) so we decided this was a cool, fun place to take someone from out of town.
Wrong-​o!
I made reservations on Open Table and requested to sit upstairs. I think the vibe is a little cooler and less club-​y upstairs, so figure it will be perfect. We show up and it’s so loud that the hostess asks me to repeat the last name at least 4 times. I eventually give up and spell it (It has 4 letters! And is not unusual in any way!) and she confirms that we still want upstairs. Yes, awesome, we do.
Except, little did I know, that they also have a room upstairs that I will call the kinda-​looks-​like-​a-​diner-​old-​people-​storage-​room that is not contemporary. It’s all beige-​y and is playing adult contemporary love jams! Yes, it’s streaming totally different music from the rest of the place. It’s like we walked into a totally different restaurant.
Our meal was fine. Below average for the prices, but ok. But really?! Why does this room exist, first of all, and secondly, why use it for reservations!

it was ok… nothing special… the fish didn’t taste like the freshest… I guess I’m spoiled living in Southern California though… so it’s really hard to compare
This place might be great for people who like to order rolls rather than nigiri…

Sushi is one of the things I love most about being alive.
I’m not even being dramatic. When done well, it is like a smooth rush of flavor and texture and doesn’t make you feel fat. Well, with the amount of sushi hubby and I eat, it is possible. But, I digress.
Dear friends of ours took us to Sushi Rock and West Side Market in the same day, and they swore that we were in for a treat! The market was like Disneyland for me, but the restaurant did little to impress.
The ambiance is chill and the waitstaff is modish. But, that’s kind of the best part. The food was just mediocre. The sushi rolls were flavorful but huuuge, which made them really difficult to eat, the rice was dry and gummy, no tempura on the menu, and maybe it was just me? But, I think we came at the end of their lunch hour, which seemed to effect our service. I had to ask for my tea three times and didn’t get it until the end of the meal.
I can’t see hubby and I racing back here, but if we did, I think we would try an evening happy hour or ½ price night.

I was about to give Sushi Rock three stars. But, due to the ambiance, the company, as well as just the overall great time I had there, I give it four stars.
I love the set up of this place. After I parked randomly in front of the Pinnacle around the corner of Sushi Rock on W. 6^th (some places in Cleveland I wonder, at times, if it’s okay to park there), I went to meet my co-​workers for some mid-​week night sushi.
When I walked in, I was greeted by definitely a cool vibe– working professionals everywhere, and there was a DJ. Yes, a DJ. How strange… I was expecting a Japanese restaurant. We were led up the stairs to this spacious second floor– one side being a bright room full of tables, the other side full of booths, with dark lighting. We were led to the latter.
Since it was half-​off Wednesday (yes!), we decided to start off with appetizers. The calamari had a great sweet and sour sauce over it. Mmm. Definitely good. My friend ordered the kobe steak appetizer as well– the kobe steak was cooked perfectly– just the random veggies they had off to the size. Here, the kobe steak was marinated in some type of sesame, soy sauce, something marinade… and the veggies off to the side had some mayo-​creamy dressing. Weird weird combo.
We ordered the sushi. I think, overall, the grade was okay. I wasn’t a fan of how big the rolls were, in terms of ability to stuff into your mouth. I want my sushi in one bite, thank you very much. My mouth couldn’t expand wide enough to fit Sushi Rock’s sushi. We ordered one of my co-​workers favorite– the Big Mouth. There was a tad too much spicy mayo on it, over drenching the tuna and masago, but still good. The others were pretty good as well– surf clam, eel, salmon, etcera. A little small in quantity, but still good.
We had some fun with the sake as well. Kind of wish they had more flavors, but they had a pretty good selection– for Cleveland, that is.
One of my co-​workers randomly ordered the chocolate cake at the end. It was gigantic. Beyond gigantic… huge. It was a tad too sweet and dense (could have been moist-​er), but kind of funny to have at a Japanese restaurant.
Overall, the food was ok, but the ambiance was so worth it. The DJ was playing up R&B classics from the 90s, and bopping along to the music while enjoying dinner after a long day of work was definitely a good time…

The sushi here is okay. It’s not awful but it’s not spectacular. We ordered five rolls to share among a group of four. The rolls were tasty but were not memorable, as I’m looking at the menu now and can’t remember what we ordered.
The service was ridiculously poor when we went, which was pretty sad because we were one of possibly five tables in the entire place. It took twenty minutes to get our water, and then our appetizers came out about three minutes before our rolls. Our waitress forgot about us quite a few times.
I would go here again if I was invited, but I would not seek it out again on my own.

They got rid of my favorite roll ever. The dynamite roll.
And the sushi chefs «forgot» how to make it.
Instead, I got the spicy crunch roll instead. It was not good. It was like a gigantic spicy tuna roll.
Yuck.
Damn you Sushi Rock, damn you!