Doozo Japanese Restaurant

I’m surprised a place like this is still open, TBH.
My BF and I came here late one night when we were craving sushi and this was the quickest place that could seat us that was open. We were sat on a two top and the place was completely empty for our entire meal.
We ordered a couple «generic» type rolls; e.g. california, and was surprised at how bad everything tasted. I don’t understand how a place can mess up such simple rolls.
The staff, however, was very very nice and the reason why I am giving it two starts versus one. But they really need to step up on the quality of their food.

I ate here three nights ago and got the WORST CASE OF FOOD POISONING that I could have ever imagined. It caused me to spend today in the Emergency Room, on an IV.
SOME ADVICE: DO NOT EAT HERE.

Don’t let those older reviews scare you, this place is right on for the ambience and the price. Our group of 4 was very happy with the yakisoba, black dragon and spicy tuna rolls, unagi sushi, and gyoza. I don’t know about the shrimp…

FOOD POISONING! Within 10 minutes of finishing my lunch I felt a strange sensation in my stomach. I thought to myself that food poisoning occurs either several hours or right away after eating tainted food. It had been over 12 hours since I ate last.
After almost crapping my pants (literally 5 minutes from onset of symptoms to OMG my ass can’t clench anymore), I had a quick blast and peed out of my butt. Strangely enough, I felt nauseous for the rest of the day.
REALLY. A 4 item combo lunch for $ 7.95 did ring a couple of alarm bells in my head that I ignored. In this area it should have been AT LEAST $ 12.95.
Never trust a big butt and a smile nor a $ 7.95 japanese restaurant combo lunch near NYU.

A 1.5 star average on Unilocal is pretty depressing. however, they recently changed their name to Toto (perhaps to escape from all these bad reviews haunting them?). not sure if management or ANYTHING about this place has changed aside from the name, but just a heads up!

Yeah, I’d say these reviews are all about right about this place. It’s a crappy, hole in the wall Japanese joint on Thompson that feels more like eating sushi in middle America rather than cosmopolitan NYC.
How did I end up here? On a day that I was just too tired to make any decisions or check Unilocal I let a friend lead me into these depths. The bento box sounded edible but what came out amounted to a Japanese TV dinner… except that I imagine others may even be able to do better than this version of TV dinner. Everything was overly salty, the shumai was over nuked and the miso soup was almost briny.
Any place that does their sushi preparations in a hidden back kitchen should not be trusted.

I have experienced few worse restaurants than Doozo in my life. I’m sure they’re out there, but I think I’ve managed to steer clear of them for the most part thus far…
I came here with a very large group for a conference over lunch. Based on the reviews, my expectations were set very low, but I think Doozo still managed to come up short.
To me, Doozo’s problems stem from the aesthetics of the place. I’m not usually one to complain about the décor or cleanliness of a place, but the décor in Doozo really makes you concerned for your health. It looks like it was decorated in the mid 1980s, complete with blue and yellow neon lights, and hasn’t been thoroughly cleaned since. Furniture seems sort of strewn about in the back room, and the bathroom doors are covered in graffiti.
Beyond that, they served everything to us in plastic — from cups to plates to sushi platters. The food was palatable, but for the record I was very hungry and the atmosphere must have taken at least some of my appetite away. In my opinion, there’s no reason whatever that anyone should come here.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWW!!!
My wife picked up their $ 7.95 lunch a few times in the past and as i was starving one night and too tired to get 5 blocks over to sushi mambo (da best!!), she dragged me into her ‘great sushi’ spot. it was 9pm and there was not 1 person in the restaurant! i didn’t want to stay but after a dirty look, i did. we immediately ordered miso soups which were okay (u can’t f*#%K up miso soup). then the extremely uninterested waiter asked if we want a drink. i asked about sake and after a little back and forth i explained i wanted unfiltered hot sake. he brought regular clear as water sake. i said i ordered unfiltered, he says ‘u say junmai’, which may have been in the conversation as i wanted to know if they have a not so dry sake. so he said ‘junmai’ and i said no i rather prefer the unfiltered milky sake’s. so now he discloses they have a sake menu and says he’ll bring unfiltered, $ 17.95, and can’t return the opened junmai, we can take it home if we want but we’re paying for it. this whole time i’m browsing the menu and notice that for an old dump which hasn’t had a dollar invested in it since the early 80’s, they’ve got enough nerve to price their menu at or more than places like sushi mambo (bleeker&cornelia) and east (4 loc’s betw the e40’s and west side). house rolls start at $ 12 with nothing special about them.
at this point the sushi was served and the brown rice i asked for was only used for 1 of my rolls… idiot. about 10 minutes into our meal i notice something the size of a pea shooting across our table between me and the wife. she shrieks and i captured the critter with the bottle cap from the ‘unfiltered sake’. the waiter comes and i show him the prize we discovered.
our check came out to $ 53 on 3 rolls and a $ 18 sake bottle.
the junmai bottle was a parting gift which my wife immediately grabbed when she caught the crazy look in my eye telling her i’d crack it over him and shank the sushi chef if he didn’t shut up and apologize.
Lesson:
AS LONG AS YOU KNOW ENOUGH NOT TO EAT CHINESE FOOD, DON’T EAT IN A SUSHI RESTAURANT RUN BY CHINESE !! STICK TO THE SOURCES — THERE R ENOUGH SUSHI SPOTS IN THE CITY OWNED BY PROUD JAPANESE FAMILIES AND THOSE FAMILIES KNOW ENOUGH TO NOT OPEN UP SHOP IN THE HEART OF TOURIST AREAS (or NYU for that matter, these kids really have low standards — mostly choose their cuisine by their student budgets, period)
GOTO YOUTUBE — LEARN HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN FOOOOOD!

If I could give Doozo a –34 085 734 985 793 I would! What a TERRIBLE PLACE! My boyfriend and I both ordered the Chicken Soba soup. Oh god… Typing this brings back terrible memories of what we now refer to as the «Ficken Noodle Soup» we at that one time. Neither of us are convinced that the garbage smelling soup had chicken in it. The pink mystery meat has burned it’s nasty taste in my memory. And for $ 10 a (small) bowl no less! I literally RAN out of there half way through my soup, looking for some boiling water to clean my mouth out with. UGH!
AVOID! AVOID!

2.5 stars. Not much to say or expect about this Chinese-​owned Japanese restaurant. It was around 1:30pm on a Sudany, hoping to hit up a brunch place, but of course, most of the popular places nearby were full. Disappointed and in a hurry to get to my next appointment after a fabulous film at the IFC, I needed something quick and painless, so I dropped by this place because a $ 8 bento was a pretty good deal. My eating companion got the salmon teriyaki bento. That came with 2 frozen section shumai, just washed salad, 4 pieces of Cali rolls and a farm-​raised piece of salmon topped with store bought teriyaki sauce. Oh and a bowl of miso soup. It’s a good amount to fill your stomach and we got some hot green tea (not the Japanese kind) when we asked. I wanted a vegetarian meal, so I had the dinner entrée dish — 4 steamed items with rice for $ 10. Luckily, they didn’t charge me extra for brown rice. I could rationalize that for I could steam my own veggies for less than a dollar at home, but when you’re out, you’re at the mercy of the dining business. Anyway, the broccoli and tofu were fresh, otherwise, most other items hailed from a can. The service was good, but we were the only patrons at that time. It seems like this restaurant’s major income comes from take-​out. I feel bad that this place was so empty, while others were packed. But when you’re trying to slide by with mediore Japanese sushi, there’s not much you can do but offer competitive prices.

UGH. Worst meal I’ve had in a while.
I just ordered a lunch delivery from here (via
) and am very disappointed. (
reviewers must have been on crack when rating this place 4 stars for quality — how foolish of me not to have checked Unilocal first!)
1) The hand rolls were just huge chunks of unappetizing slabs of fish haphazardly thrown together, sloppily wrapped in nori, and of dubious quality. The pieces of raw fish had a sort of chewy texture and obviously hacked off by someone who doesn’t know how to cut sushi properly. I was disturbed by the dried-​up edges & brownish tinge to a few hamachi pieces, as if they’d been sitting out for hours. Eww.
2) Miso soup was flavorless and contained barely visible pieces of tofu. (I’m talking *maybe* 3 mm cubed!)
3) Hot green tea does not taste like Japanese green tea at all (more like yellowish hot water with a slight touch of jasmine & B.O.) and came in a rather unattractive clear plastic soup container, looking very much like a warm urine sample at the dr’s office. They’re probably just out of cups, but just saying! I’m a tea lover but did not love this.
After reading the other reviews, I am now too frightened to finish eating my meal. Will stick to nibbling the sushi ginger and hope for the best.
Just looked at the paper delivery menu and would hazard a guess that this place isn’t owned Japanese-​owned.

Cheap and baaad. The vegetable soup was vegetables in water with salt. Spinach dish was slightly better but still not there… spicy salmon roll was ok… but I won’t be back here anytime soon.

I was attracted to this place by the drink deal: buy one-​get one free for all beer, sake and wine. I don’t know if this is only on certain days or what, but I went on a Tuesday night at 9:30 and it was going on. I had the vegetable dumplings, which were green and cold, but actually very good. The person I went with had a sweet potato roll and a shrimp tempura roll, both of which were as good as I’ve had anywhere else. I definitely plan on going back soon to try some of the real sushi.