Tokyo Not Your Average Joe

Awful. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Food was TERRIBLE and the service was just… bizarre. My brother-​in-​law ended up throwing away his meal after barely a bite. Just say «no» to Tokyo Joe.

I decided to get a Unilocal account for this restaurant. This restaurant really is not your average Joe. It’s WAY WORSE THAN AVERAGE!!! My friends and I were on a road trip to Florida and detoured for this restaurant because the reviews were good. TERRIBLE MISTAKE! Here are the reasons:
1) Terrible services
2) Food was not fresh
3) Disorganization
4) Food was not fully cooked. Seriously, how do you mess up rice when you are a Japanese restaurant?
In case anyone wonders, here’s the detailed story:
We were a group of 6 and arrived around 7:30 — 8:00 pm. We stood at the entrance for a good 5 minutes. Not because they were busy, the waiters obviously saw us but just chose to let us hanging until later to tell us to sit wherever we like.
We took a table and realized for some reason the table was very sticky and so were the menus.
The waiter then came to take our orders. We each order an entrée complementary with soup and salad. However the waiter kept on forgetting one of my friends’ order. The waiter forgot my friend’s salad and we reminded him, but he then forgot about his soup too! The most ridiculous thing was he forgot his entrée! When we reminded the waiter about the entrée he said the kitchen forgot to make it but we heard him went to put in the order after we reminded him. In the end, my friend’s food finally came… not cooked completely! He ordered a Katsu Don which is pork, it’s dangerous to eat not fully cooked pork and the kitchen didn’t even care what food they were bringing their customers. Both the meat and the rice were not cook thoroughly. Seriously this is my worst restaurant experience in my life. Oh, my friends who had their sashimi got diarrhea later that night.

I am not sure about the experiences people are having with bad service because mine was fantastic. We came in and said we wanted to place a to go order. The owner handed us a free sweet potato roll and said to eat it while we made up our mind. was a nice touch. Then as we went through the list we placed our order to go and expected to just wait. Well again the owner heard my date mention how hungry she was so he just popped a tuna hand roll over to her free of charge. That is just something you just dont see anywhere else.
On to the sushi. The potato roll and spicy tuna hand rolls were really quite good. The rice was really good. Ive been dissapointed with sushi just bc the rice isnt right in the past at other places. A few of the sushi rolls we ordered were particularly wet (sauces etc) but it wasnt to hide old fish. The fish was fresh and had good color.
I have already told others about this restaurant and I will guarantee I go back.

Worst. Restaurant. That. I. Have. Ever. Been. To… In. My. Life.
My boyfriend and I went on a Tuesday night. I could go into all the nitty gritty details and copy and paste the email I sent the restaurant, but I won’t do I can spare you guys the novel.
Basically:
1.) Poor food quality (not fresh)
2.) Poor wait staff (disorganized, untrained, etc.)
3.) Poor chefs (especially the 17 year old gangster who works at the sushi bar and doesn’t take responsibility for his food and has attitude and is mouthy and wants the entire restaurant to know how he feels and «doesn’t care what people think»)
4.) Poor ownership. I never heard anything back from the staff or the owner, Bill.
Save yourself the time and money (pricey!) and go somewhere… scratch that, anywhere… else! I am truly disappointed and embarrassed for this place.

Had dinner on a Friday night with my girlfriend and read the reviews that the food is generally good but there can be service problems.
We had no problems with service. Megan was our wait person and she did a fine job of taking care of us and our food was served promptly.
We had a variety of sushi rolls that were all good. We did try the sweet potato roll because others had recommended it and yes it is yummy.
We plan on coming back and I would recommend TNYAG for a reasonably priced sushi night out.

Sushi is OK. The sweet potato roll is my favorite. However, the last 2 times I have ordered the vegetable gyoza it comes out all broken open and destroyed. One time it was to go and it came out while I was waiting and it literally looked like they had all be run over. Who sends something out like that???

I love this place!
1^st, the owner is so nice and friendly and we always feel welcome when we go. No need for reservations, even on a busy holiday like Valentines we got a table really fast.
You always get a complimentary roll when you walk in just because. They usually send over the sweet potato roll and its the shiznit!
I really love their specialty rolls, pixie roll, tokyo not your average joe roll and the owner even made a special roll for me (Miami girl) called it «Bring the Heat roll» .
Always a fun place to go.

If you are wanting top notch sushi, I wouldn’t advise you to come here. It’s not the best, but it’s good.
I think the prices are fair for the portion sizes, and the sushi rolls are good. I think the sauces they use compliment the sushi well, but they are definitely not for someone who wants a very clean, minimal roll. I’ve tried the Dragon & Phoenix roll, Geisha roll, as well as a spicy yellowtail roll and I found them all to be tasty. I will agree with a previous reviewer that my rolls were a little sloppy, but I am not by any means a sushi expert. If it tastes good, let me eat it!
This place is also conveniently close, which is a factor on why I keep returning. I admit that I have not tried the sushi/​sashimi, so I can’t comment on that. I like the rolls a lot, and I’ll be returning here when I crave some!

I have been to the Patterson ave. location several times for both dinner and lunch, take out and dine in. Every time I have been very pleased with service, which is friendly and informal, and the sushi is generally always awesome. Only once, on a Wednesday, did I get less fresh than usual fish. Each time I’ve dined in they give a free sweet potato sushi appetizer — granted it’s a thinly cut roll but it’s something.
This place is also very cheap for the quality sushi you get. Recommend!
Pros:
Friendly ‘café’ style enviornment
Friendly, young staff
Feels very animé fan friendly for some reason
No need to dress up
A «neighborhood» style place
Cons:
Closed on Sunday :(

The food still gets 4 stars but the service is slipping down to 2 stars. Seems to have high staff turn over so no one is really sure of what is on the menu or how to efficiently use their time.

It’s a cute little place in Richmond for sushi but I wouldn’t call it the best sushi I’ve ever had. Their prices are, however, reasonable. Their special sushi rolls are pretty good especially the sweet potato roll that includes a nice crunch and unagi sauce.
I made the mistake of ordering their regular maki rolls for my meal and the taste was lacking. Their sushi rice left little to be desired and the rolls come out very cold making it a bit difficult to eat. I think next time, I’ll stick to their specialty rolls.

Can’t recommend it enough. I’ve been here twice, and both times the service was excellent and I left in a good mood. My palate was pleased and my tummy was happy — satisfied, but not so full I wanted to fall asleep. A good choice if you’re trying to eat healthily, but want to reward yourself with something nice.
The lighting is bright, but warm — you won’t need a flashlight to read the menu. They had white Christmas lights strung along the ceiling for the holiday season. Overall, an inviting and cozy ambiance.
Visited today after work for dinner. They let me sit wherever I wanted, and the tables were all the same size. So I chose the corner in the booth-​like seat. (Coziest seat in the place.)
Took me a few minutes to realize that the more interesting sushi rolls were at the back of the menu. I ordered the rainbow roll with the Japanese green salad and miso soup. (The soup and salad are small and inexpensive, if you wanted to order both.) The soup was piping hot, and the salad was crisp and cold. I asked for more sesame-​ginger dressing, which I particularly look forward to when visiting any Japanese restaurant. My server brought me a small bowl that could’ve topped several salads. Holy cow.
The rainbow roll was made with fresh ingredients, and the presentation was gorgeous (picture posted). The sauces drizzled on the plate were especially delicious. There was only a token dab of wasabi on my plate, so I asked for more. Again, my server brought out a dish with enough wasabi to fuel a smart car. And this wasn’t weak, grocery store wasabi — it burned! Yes!
I had the green tea served iced, just because. I think it was genmaicha — it had that wonderful toastiness to it. They offered me refills.
The only possibly negative things worth mentioning… one, there wasn’t any salmon roe on my rainbow roll. Instead, it was topped with crispy stuff that added texture. But I think salmon roe is overrated. Maybe I’m just too uncultured to appreciate it. And perhaps other items on the menu had it. Not something I look for. The other thing I noticed was that when I sat down, they didn’t take the extra place settings away. Again, not a big deal. They took my plates as I was finished with them, and that’s all I really cared about. The miso soup wasn’t as good once it had cooled. Moral of the story: Eat your soup while it’s hot.
But in general, they’re good about the details — beautiful presentation of the food, clean and organized. It’s nice enough that you can feel comfortable bringing friends, yet low-​key enough that you don’t feel obligated to dress up. For a place like this, it’s reasonably priced. It was about $ 15 for the rainbow roll, salad and miso soup. Tokyo Not-​Your-​Average-​Joe is a well-​kept secret, since it doesn’t seem to be crowded. I think they deserve more business.

I came here with two others because we were hungry after going to the gym. We had heard good things about this place and it wasn’t too far from us so we decided to give it a shot. The place is nice, clean, and they have a good variety of items on the menu. They even gave us a free roll to try while we were looking over the menu.
We had come around 5pm, which was past the lunch period, but they said we could order off of it anyway. So we thought, hey, it’s a good deal for what’s included, so why not? The sushi was pretty good, «Death by Sushi» was the favorite. That’s where the good part ends.
First off, my hubby ordered a sprite, and it turned out that it was just carbonated water. It turns out that they had run out of the syrup (who runs out of sprite?). Then, and this was the big one, when we got our check, they added $ 4 to each of the lunch menu items were ordered, calling it a «Dinner fee». Well, I understand that it was dinner time when we ordered, but the waiter had said we could order off of it. AND, he made NO mention that there would be a fee. We ended up paying $ 12 extra for «dinner fees» without forewarning. If he’d mention this to us before we ordered, we would’ve been fine with it since we would’ve been informed.