Kokoro

I love this place.
I’ve been around all the Japanese restaurants in Lawrence and Kansas City, this place was the best for me. For me, salmon nigiri and roll was the best~!!! I will try other menus next time.

this japanese restaurant has great inter deco. it may look simple from outside, but is actually very classic. the teppanyaki chef is great and funny. this place may not have the best food. but if you are thinking of a party with couple of college friends this place is great. site around the teppanyaki table and enjoy

I don’t eat meat (including fish), so I can only speak to the vegetarian items on the menu. All of these are very good. Excellent tempura vegetables, excellent futomaki roll (the best in town) and the fried rice and ginger salad dressing are ridiculously good. I’d give it 5 stars except that it is on the pricey side, for me.

This is our go to place for sushi. The food is good and the service is too. They also have traditional Japanese food and a habachi grill. We always do sushi and a Kara or teriyaki tofu as an appetizer. The entry smells like fried food and the décor is a bit dated but if you want a good bit of sushi this is your spot!

I’ve been to Kokoro 8 times and thought I would post my experience since I’ve seen so many negative reviews here.
Service (3.5 stars) Everytime we have been here the service has been good, nothing fantastic, but never ignored or having to wait a long period of time. Every experience with the waitstaff and owners has been pleasent.
Sushi (4 stars) — The spider roll here is exceptional. Other rolls are just ok. Personally when I go out for sushi it’s for Nigiri, if you want rolls go to Yokohama. That being said the Nigiri sushi is some of the best in Lawrence, much better than Yokohama.
Hibachi (4 stars) — I’ve tried about everything they have to offer for the Hibachi and was never disappointed. The Teriyaki Tofu is actually amazing.

This is absolutely the WORST sushi on planet earth. I has to go home and lay down for the rest of the night because my intestines were in knots and I had the strongest urge to vomit.

What Kokoro is best at: sake bombing as a KU student. If this is you, you will LOVE Kokoro.
What you should not expect: gourmet sushi. The sushi is good — don’t get me wrong — but more in the «I’m drunk off sake bombs and wearing a costume» kind of way.

Love this place! The tofu soup, the black dragon roll, the ‘Sashimi’ bowl… The environment is good, quiet and full with Japanese style. I don’t like Japanese food that much, but I give a five star to this restaurant~

Took daughter to lunch for her birthday today, wanted to try something new. We ordered bento boxes w teriyaki chicken, miso soup with mine, and fried seafood dumplings. Dumplings were good, nice and hot. Bento boxes came out, we each took a bite of the chicken and I said do you want to leave she said yes. We have NEVER done that before so I can tell you it just was not good at all, not like any teriyaki chicken I’ve ever had, it was like unbreaded sweet & sour chicken, dry, yucky. I just paid the bill and left. Should have just pitched $ 25.00 put the window. Would not go back ever ever ever.

Kokoro tries, it really does.
It boasts a huge, garish menu with bold, sometimes intensely odd menu items. One of the rolls comes with «KC Strip Steak» on it, and the others are tired California roll executions and variations. Overall, I was left with the feeling as the restaurant seems to be hiding something. I believe that «something» is very poor management, as evidenced by the wildly different experiences that people seem to have here.
It’s a cute restaurant, and my hot food orders have always been good — but the sushi seemed questionable, flavorless or boring.
At the end of the day, nothing screams out for me at Kokoro, and it falls to the wayside as just another semi-​Japanese restaurant in the Midwest. Maybe I’m just spoiled by California.

The best word to succinctly describe my experience at Kokoro is: Ugh.
Here’s the longer version of why my experience was an utter disappointment…
First, their menu is huge — not uncommon for sushi joints nowadays — but if you actually examine it carefully, nearly every item is an iteration of the California roll (California with eel, California with salmon; California with tuna…). Really? This seems like a copout way out of actually creating new rolls.
Given this uninspired menu, you’d think it wouldn’t be hard to execute these numerous California-​roll-​like-​items. But service here is a mess. I know we had a large party of 10, but our server was completely disorganized… she didn’t know what some of the menu items were and didn’t even offer to find out for us, instead choosing to give us a deer-​in-​the-​headlights stare. Our glasses were inconsistently refilled (I was ignored the entire dinner), and when we asked for soy sauce dipping plates about 5 were brought out for the whole table (9 people ordered sushi). Not to mention our orders came out sporadically, with the first person receiving their meal around 25 minutes before the last person received their meal! We were here for a celebratory occasion and this stilted, staggered dining experience did not do my friend justice. Oh and if you’re curious… we were one of two tables in the restaurant at the time. A busy night was clearly not the cause of these issues.
But worst of all? Our server took the liberty of giving herself an automatic 20% gratuity for our party. I am not arguing against automatic gratuity at all; I actually support it because I sympathize with the fact that large groups are a pain to serve. However, in my experience the standard in Lawrence is an 18% added gratuity for casual dining restaurants, and maybe 20% for the upscale ones. Kokoro is NOT an upscale establishment, and our careless sever did not deserve the 20% tip that was claimed.
On a final note, the quality of the food is only mediocre. My sashimi platter reflected the relatively lower price here; the salmon had a heavy, oily taste and the tuna had some mildly sour notes. Nothing inedible, but people eat sashimi for its light, crisp flavor, and the sashimi here lacked that freshness.
I simply can’t be impressed by a restaurant that has the nerve to overtip their undertrained staff for sloppy service and borderline quality fish. Unless Kokoro gets their act together I’m going to opt for one of the sushi places on Mass St. instead.

Ordered katzu pork bento for takeaway. It was pretty boring, it would probably been better to eat there since the food was fried. Fried is better fresh.

They have the best ginger salad dressing ever! It has the perfect balance between sweet and savory.
Normally I go to Kokoro for seafood tofu soup. It comes sizzling in a hot stone pot with an egg on the side. If you can’t handle the spice, you can break the egg yolk and mix with the broth. I love spicy food so normally I ask for extra spice. I just dump the rice in the pot and it is just heavenly.
Today however, I wanted to try something different. As soon as we walked in, my husband and I noticed the lobster dynamite roll on the special menu sign and we ordered it. And once I had the first bite, it instantly became my favorite roll there (previously it was the red dragon roll). We each had also ordered a bento box (shogun with 5 nigiri sushi and teriyaki chicken, and don katsu — breaded pork loin — with tempura mix), and they were good, too, but we agreed that next time we’ll just order 4 of the lobster dynamite roll.

This is one of my favorite places ever to eat in Lawrence since I moved here 4 years ago. That being said, I have noticed staffing changes and understaffing recently that has made recent experiences not as good (slower service, inattentive, etc.). I hope that trend doesn’t continue. I have not, however, found it dirty, even recently, as another reviewer had.
I’m not a sushi fan, so I go for the hibachi. I love hibachi, and have been to this type of restaurant all over the country. Price-​wise, I find their hibachi to be average for this type of restaurant. I appreciate that you can order it without sitting through the ‘show’ at the Teppanyaki tables which I have seen two dozen times and is the same at every restaurant.
I love the onion soup that comes with these meals so much I occasionally go and pick up a big tub of it from them for lunch throughout the week. Quality has been consistently good every time I have visited– I find the steak they use slightly tough (but usually order filet anyway and it’s delicious, always cooked nicely and super tender), but no problems with the chicken and shrimp. Rice and salad (love the ginger dressing) are the norm, side veggies so-​so. The hibachi sauces are among the best I’ve had at any hibachi place.

I wanted to like Kokoro. Really, I did. I’ve learned how to temper my sushi expectations from east coast standards to midwest standards and you know what, I’ve had good sushi out here. Unfortunately, it wasn’t from Kokoro.
Our visit last Friday was such a disappointment. We weren’t greeted when we walked in and kind of awkwardly hovered around the door/​bar area before someone realized we were waiting to be seated. Our server, while obviously working hard and well-​intentioned, just seemed too busy to handle his tables. Sub par service is always forgivable for me if the food lives up to the hype, but the sushi was so… meh. My dude actually received one of his sushi rolls (some California roll with beef teriyaki thrown on top) a good 15 – 20 minutes before the rest of our rolls showed up at the table, for some strange reason. Being the sweetheart he is, he waited until my food arrived, but the teriyaki on top of his roll was ice cold by then. There was nothing offensively bad about the spicy tuna roll (we got two orders of that,) but I was pretty bummed about the Crazy Roll I ordered. I probably should have known that a roll with (allegedly) six different kinds of fish in it might have some structural integrity issues. One of my pet peeves is a sushi roll that is too big to be called «bite-​sized» and the Crazy Roll quite certainly was a giant thing that fell apart pretty easily when I tried to take a bite. It was just messy and awkward and didn’t taste great enough to justify the mess or awkwardness.
Two stars is about as generous as I can be. What probably bugs me the most is that Kokoro seems really overpriced; i.e., it’s just not a good value for what you end up getting. Sushi is such a luxury for me and I hate spending $ 40-​$ 50 on a meal that isn’t awesome. I’ll stick to the better sushi I’ve had out here and won’t return.

I love this place! I think their sushi is yummy, their bento boxes are yummy, and so are their hibachi grill meals! It has a nice, quiet dinning area, with fun things on the walls to look at and a few tvs around. My husband and I really love going here to satisfy our sushi cravings without having to dive too far into our pockets.

This place is always understaffed. In fact, we walked out of there once because it took the waiter 30 minutes to come take our order… and another time we left one cent because it took them 20 minute to come back with our change… Other than that, the foods ok! :)

This restaurant has had its ups and downs, but at present it seems to be getting better and better. I am hoping it keeps improving.
They recently installed very comfortable, new booths along the back wall. Yes, it keeps getting better. If you haven’t been there for a while, you should give it another try.