Bonsai Bistro

Came for sushi, stayed for awesome dinner service by Ryan. Go see this dude, he will hook you up with fish food and food that is fish. 5/​5, would feed koi fish again.

There’s a reason why each site you check reviews (FB, Google, Unilocal) they’re lower and lower. The service was terrible. We had to asked to be served after sitting alone without being acknowledged for over 10 minutes. Then, after another wait, 25 minutes this time, we had to flag down our waitress again. She promptly brought us cold, different than described food. We didn’t have time to argue or discuss as we were quickly scarfing down our food in an attempt to get back to work in a reasonable timeframe. Terrible service, and the food wasn’t that good. Thankful for the view but that doesn’t come near to covering the inadequacies in the restaurant!

Unfortunately I have visited this place numerous times.
I love the location and the outside area.
But the food and service are sub par. Overpriced
And now time to go elsewhere.

I’ve been twice since moving to the area — the first time I got Pad Thai, the other Thai Curry w/​Rice noodles. My dad got the Tofu & Veg stir fry. We started with some crispy veg rolls. The quality is all ‘meh’. Rolls were obviously frozen, roll crispy but veggie mushy. The sauces are thin, ok spiced, and have an oddly generic flavor– not Thai, not Indian, not Japanese, not Korean — it’s something just kinda like those. The tofu is like a kitchen sponge. Dad said peanut sauce was good. Plates all have very few vegetables and massive heap of fried noodles/​rice & tofu (very brown, not colorful). The portion is large, but for $ 14 I expect way better quality. They clearly have tried to minimize their food cost so they can have a koi pond and tons of wait staff — great for ripping off tourists and people with plain taste, but I’ll never be going back.

We love bonsi Bistro but we were very disappointed on the day after Thanksgiving for the Cda parade and lighting festival. The service was slow, no fault of our server she was overworked. The disappointment was in the menu offered for $ 60 each. Previous years there have been special 5 course menu not usually available, this year the value was poor. Regular menu choices for $ 60 per person. Needless to say my husband and I paid $ 120 for their regular menu choices. The view was wonderful for the festivities but not worth the cost of the ordinary menu. We ran into friends that felt the same…

This review is not for food quality which would definitely be 4.5 stars. This review is for treatment by management.
I have reviewed very few businesses on Unilocal as I am for the most part very «go with the flow» and don’t like to rock the boat. However, I felt the treatment my sister received today by the «manager on duty» at Bonsai Bistro deserved attention. I very much hope someone from this establishment looks at these reviews and rethinks the people they put in charge of their restaurant.
I have been coming to CDA for over 8 years as my family has a vacation home here. Over the years we have gone to Bonsai Bistro quite a few times. They had a really great bartender named Troy who we got to know and found the rest of the staff to always be very friendly and accommodating until today.
We went into Bonsai last night with a group of nine. It was absolutely packed and the waitress did a phenomenal job of taking care of all of us and the rest of her tables. When our food came she realized she accidentally forgot my eight year old niece’s order so she rushed to get it made for us. Due to how busy it was in the kitchen it didn’t come out until after we were all done with our food so we boxed it up and were told we wouldn’t be charged for her meal. We paid the bill, tipped the waitress hefty and made our way home. When we got home we realized we were charged for not one but two kids meals. My sister called and we were told we could come in the next day to get a refund of the money; $ 6.99 per meal so about $ 15 with tax.
When she went in the next afternoon around 2pm she was met by a dark haired woman in her late 20’s. She explained the entire situation thinking the woman would look at the receipt, refund the money and call it a day. Instead, the girl berated my sister with questions on why she didn’t come back last night and told her that the person she spoke with on the phone last night had no idea what they were talking about. My sister asked to speak with a manager because she was really unhappy with the way this woman was speaking to her and was told that she was the manager. The woman then went on to tell my sister that if she wanted a refund it would be coming out of her own tips (extreme attitude to be inserted here) as they had already gone to the bank for yesterday’s deposit. I’m sorry what?!? In what business realm is that response ever ok?!? The answer would be never.
The customer should never feel that they have to plead their case in an instance where it was clearly the restaurant’s fault. I know it was only $ 15, but it’s the principle. This woman should definitely be given a lesson or two in customer service before being given the title of manager. If this is how the manager is treating the customers, makes you wonder about the rest of the staff.

Loved this place for their happy hour offerings! We practically ordered half the menu, but luckily the bartender was nice and let us know it might have been too much food so we scaled back. I appreciated his candidness with us. Everything we had was delicious! I highly recommend their HH mussel and oyster shooters!

Food and service very underwhelming. Happy Hour on a very quiet Monday only available downstairs with a totally lackluster ‘chef’. Zero personality, staff mainly gossiping behind in the kitchen — do they think we can’t hear? APPALLINGLY bad glass of white happy hour wine, unidentifiable — even after asking 3 staff members — chateaux cardboardeaux vintage whogivesacrap comes to mind. why DO THAT… so we moved upstairs to have a better experience for our entrée and also, of course, to pay full price in an empty restaurant — only to experience spongy beef Kung Pao — not bad flavors but nasty meat and $ 14.00 each cocktails. Happy Birthday to me, we won’t be back.

We had lunch with a group here. We were seated promptly and our waiter was excellent throughout the meal. However the restaurant was freezing! Lay off the AC a little, guys! They have a nice selection of ramen bowls for lunch and I feel like I missed an opportunity by not ordering one — they looked amazing! I ordered the cantonese rice noodles with shrimp; I was hoping they would have a lot of chard however they were pretty light on the green. The shrimp were great quality and fresh. It was tasty but not quite what I expected. Next time I’ll try that ramen!

I really don’t understand the bad reviews. If anything, I’m noticing that the people in CdA aren’t Unilocaling right. Just because the waiter looked at you bad doesn’t mean you need to give the place one star. You’re doing it wrong. Anyways…
This is place was pretty awesome. Anything with a beautiful view and good food along with great service gets my vote.
Since Idaho is all about huckleberries, I jumped at the chance to taste a huckleberry beer. Great way to start it off in an Asian restaurant.
Followed that up with the grilled king salmon with huckleberry aioli. Are you kidding me? I’m trying this at home when I get back to LA!
I especially loved the downstairs koi pond area where your table is on an island, surrounded by beautiful koi fish. Nice. I can see this place getting ridiculously slammed come summer season. Will definitely visit again.

We are extremely angry with this restaurant and we haven’t even eaten there yet. (and now after reading these other reviews we never will).
On Sunday we stopped by the Calypso coffee bar that shares the car park with Bonsai. We have been going there on a Sunday on and off for years. This time we were there for about 30 minutes, came out and our car had a BOOT on it!
Seriously. Sunday afternoon in a half empty car park in CDA getting booted!
We complained to the guy who booted us. He said we were parked in Bonsai’s parking spaces. They have put up signs that look suspiciously like they were designed not to be noticed. Grey lettering on white background. Obviously if they had been noticeable we would have parked somewhere else. there was plenty of open spaces available, despite Bonsai taking up ¾ of the car park.
On speaking to some other people, we were told that the owners of Bonsai were trying to «make it difficult» for Calypso because they wanted them gone.
We will never eat there.

While in Coeur D’Alene, I was craving for Asian food so bad that we made reservations here. I was not disappointed. We were able to sit in the island that was surrounded by the very cool koi pond downstairs! The food was rather tasty and I was impressed that good Asian food was even available in this steak and potatoes town. If we ever may or way towards that direction again, I can’t wait to come back.

This place has just about as bad of service, as you could ever get, anywhere. Took a friend here for her birthday lunch, on a Monday and literally waited an hour and 15 minutes, with NO food and NO explanation, before the birthday girl inquired about our sushi. The waitress bit our heads off and snapped that they were extra busy, because a few other people in the restaurant, had also ordered sushi. Okay… it’s a sushi restaurant. The food isn’t even very good and the service makes it unbearable. We won’t be back.

I dislike giving bad reviews but the service at this place was terrible!
Went with a group of 8 for a bachelorette party tonight. We had reservations but arrived about 10−15min late. We ordered our meals at about 8:00pm. The group had ordered some appetizers and soups that we thought would have come out before our meal. Wrong.
By 9:00pm we asked the waitress where our meal was, her response was that it was going to be about 5 more min and that there was a party of 25 upstairs who ordered ahead of us. We asked if we could have some rice or something easy to dish up to hold us over as we were all STARVING by this point and had been there well over an hour.
One of the girls in our party ended up asking another waitress if she could speak to a manager. She explained the situation and the manager said she’d check on our food but seemed really flustered like the restaurant was really busy and she didn’t have time to deal with our complaints fully. By 9:15 — 9:20ish some of the food came out to us… fried rice and beef and broccoli. You could tell the fried rice had been sitting under a heat lamp as it was really dry and crusty looking. The beef and broccoli plate and food was luke warm. As the rest of the dishes came to us, they all looked like they had been sitting out and that the kitchen staff may have put all our dishes out but no one ever came to claim them. We sent back some of the dishes like the sushi for fear it had gone bad. Some of us didn’t even get every thing we ordered.
The manager ended up comping us all for our meals (which was nice) but we had to pay for our drinks. We were all really disappointed with the restaurant as we had heard good things about the food from friends that live in town. When we left the place looked pretty empty.

So we used to like this place a decent amount, but it seems that it has gone downhill.
Last time we went my husband wasn’t very impressed with the sushi and the chicken was a terrible texture and wasn’t done very well at all. I felt like with the amount you pay the quality no longer matches.
Also, the Fuji Molten Cake USED to be amazing. When we got it, it was very small. Basically we paid for tons of ice cream and a little bit of broken up cake at the bottom. IT WAS NOT MOLTEN. And you did not break it apart with all the yummy gooeyness and marshmellow like before. EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTED. The worst is this dessert costs $ 8. $ 8 for this? It probably cost them a dollar maximum.
We most likely won’t ever be coming back.

The all you can eat sushi is absolutely delicious. Great price. Great view of the lake. The wait staff are very timely and friendly. We had such a great dinner here.

Appetizer: Crab Rangoon — wasn’t very good at all, too much crab imitation — hardly any cream cheese, it was fried a bit too long (a bit too hard/​crunchy) and the dipping sauce could be a bit better.
Entrée: I had the Thai Curry Stir Fry with Rice Noodles… It had almost no flavor at all. The texture was good, noodles were good, veggies were good — but flavor just wasn’t there at all, it was really bland. I had to add a lot of soy sauce to it. Disappointed because I was in the mood for that «curry» flavor which I ended up getting a ‘soy sauce” stir fry flavor instead. I only got maybe 2 bites of «cilantro» flavor in the entire large dish — if it had a lot more cilantro in it, it would be much better, and please… the flavor, it really needs to be fixed.
Other people at our table ordered the Hawaiian Hot and Spicy Chicken dish — they all raved about it. I will have to try this next time if I ever return here.
Prices are overpriced also — a plate of noodles (MOSTLY noodles) and veggies (SOME) for 16 bucks, OK well it had (A FEW) chicken and shrimp in it, but still overpriced in my opinion.

Very disappointed in our experience at Bonsai tonight. We stopped by the restaurant earlier in the day to check out the koi pond «river» and talked to the manager about sitting in that section for dinner tonight. We made reservations. When we arrived we were told that they had closed that section of the restaurant (the entire downstairs). There was no one seated there at the time. They sat us at a window table in the upper section. The food was good. But the service was inattentive. I ordered a glass of wine right before our food arrived. We were almost done with dinner before the wine arrived. The icing on the cake was that when we left there was a couple they had seated in the previously closed koi pond section.

Went to Bonsai for the first time with some friends from out of town. Was expecting an interesting Asian Fusion experience, and ended up with something worse than mall Chinese food.
Everyone’s entrees’ were drenched in goopy, bizarre sauces that tasted nothing like what was expected. My cashew almond chicken had a bizarre sulfur flavor that tasted like it was made in a fireworks factory. Maybe that’s what they were going for, who knows?
The service was okay, but it was fairly empty for a Friday night. Price was comparable to any downtown eatery. We paid about $ 40 for two entrees, an appetizer and two drinks. Would have been a little more worthwhile had the food been good.

I love the way this place looks — especially downstairs with the water, fish and turtles. But the food has never really impressed me much. The service has always been great, though.
When I had their one night stand roll, the salmon tasted off to me. That’s never a good thing when you’re eating raw fish!
Their spicy mayo is good and spicy, their ginger is good and their miso soup is yummy and a generous portion but the mochi ice cream is really bad! I’m a huge fan of mochi and they serve it super soft with a coconut cream filling instead of actual ice cream flavors. It just doesn’t taste good at all and the texture is all wrong. It’s suppose to melt in your mouth not be melted and stretchy on the plate already.