Sugano Japanese Restaurant

Sugano is one of the really good Japanese restaurants I have ever visited. The interior is a little bit different than what I expected it to be but, more importantly, the food was delicious. I would say that is very good place to eat Sushi. I think I should mention that the place is operated by real Japanese people. I said it because there is a Sushi restaurant that is operated by Chinese people.

Haven’t been here in a year, miss this place. Not ur normal «american-​ized» sushi joint. You will need to google half the menu lol, but fun place to try new dishes! *miso soup per request is excellent. Love the hot sakè. Sit in the side room if on a date… but not if u have holes in ur socks. :o

Best, and most authentic, sushi in town! Must have a reservation for a table and only open for dinner. It’s located in a strange place next to a biker bar, but that makes the experience more fun. I am a fan of «fru-​fru» sushi but I will admit this is very traditional and delicious sushi made by experts and with the freshest ingredients. Definitely one of my family’s favorite places to dine.

So great! Service isn’t always fantastic but the food is seriously incredible. Don’t afraid to try something new. And the sushi is the best sushi I have ever had, especially the BBQ eel.

Paul and I had dinner here four years ago, and why we waited so long to return I have no idea. We arrived shortly before opening on a Saturday and observed a line forming at the door. If you’re a foodie, you know what that means.
I ordered the same thing I ordered in July 2012, which was an avocado roll and the Mini Nabeyaki Udon. They were just as perfect as I remember them being four years ago. The avocado roll was the best I’ve ever had. My God, I don’t know how the owner gets that avocado so creamy, but it is amazing. As for the Nabeyaki, well, it was so delicious that I almost pinched myself to make sure I was not dreaming.
Tips: Arrive early or you might not get a seat, as the place is small and patrons linger. Also, do not even think about judging this place by its exterior.

I suspect this is the best Sushi in Lexington. Probably as good as I would hope for eating Sushi in the middle of the country. Pretty disappointed that they used frozen premade gyoza the night we visited. That is sad to see shortcuts like that. The service was just average, and the hardest working person in the place was the sushi chef. He was pretty awesome, but said he is retiring soon, so you better go soon, as I can’t imagine what will happen that will be positive after he leaves… He seemed to be the only thing carrying the place.

wait about 3 hours no refill water. In the end，the bill was wrong and charge me extra 10 dollar. do not choose this restaurant

Very authentic. Lots of wasabi on the nigiri. Not really clean. Service was friendly. Probably great if you’re Japanese. Not so much if you’re not.

I’ve been eating at Sugano regularly for about 10 years as this is just about the only place to get truly authentic Japanese food in this area. I have tried just about everything on the menu and have never been disappointed. Sitting at the bar and chatting and joking around with Sugano-​san while he prepares sushi has been the highlight of many of my days. As I understand, he is retiring in August so if you haven’t tried this place, get there at least once before it’s too late. It will be so hard for me to say goodbye to the people and place that have brought me such joy for a little over a decade. I wish Sugano-​san a wonderful retirement! You will be missed!

Best sushi place in Lexington, probably also around 100 miles radius. Fish all come in fresh, non-​frozen. Love the sweet shrimp and eel.
Rice was also cooked just right– which is extremely important in Japanese cuisine.

Sugano is Lexington’s hidden gem for Japanese food. Chef Mr. Sugano is a classically trained Japanese chef that has trained many other people in the art of Japanese cuisine. He was brought to Lexington by the Toyota people and has been this towns biggest secret ever since.
The place is understated, simple, and has a hole-​in-​the-​wall atmosphere. In addition to the regular tables, they also have more traditional Japanese style dining areas in the back where a group of 6 to 8 can dine. If you are dining alone, there is no better place to sit than the bar section, where you can watch the chef prepare the raw dishes. I have been coming here for the last 7 years, only recently visiting it on a more regular basis. Menu is full of sushi/​sashimi options, noodles and other cooked traditional Japanese dishes. I usually like getting a roll, a few pieces of sashimi such as scallop sashimi, with the silken texture, and an order of my favorite fried tofu dish, called Agedashi tofu. One thing that’s definitely awesome is the pacific coast oysters that they can prepare raw or cooked. They are double the size of the East coast oysters, quite tasty and worth the try! You will not see them on the menu but can order them without any problems.
I don’t know anyone who has tried Sugano and left unsatisfied. Having been out of town for a month now, Sugano is on top of the list of places I would like to visit when I go back to Lexington!

Best restaurant in Lexington for phenomenal sushi. I have been to all the sushi restaurants in Lexington and many other cities. The sashimi pieces tonight were flavorful and tender. I wonder if this is how sushi tastes in Japan. There is one sushi chef, who is the owner. He reminds me of Jiro from the documentary, «Jiro Loves Sushi.»
I read the negative reviews on here, and here are my thoughts. The location is in the sketchy part of town, and no visual signs of the restaurant in the strip mall. The restaurant is small. If arrive when they are busy, expect to wait because there is only one sushi chef. The staff is very friendly. Set your expectation to low for ambience. I go there for the sushi and noodles. Just delicious!!!

Have you noticed that folks seem to really love or really hate this place? I think I have the answer. As best I can tell, if you’re Japanese, look Japanese, or just look like a serious business businessman, your experience here will be very different than other folks’.
As has been said, the location is crappy, a bad area of town in a run-​down, out-​of-​the-​way strip mall beside a «lounge» that plays loud karaōke (which you can hear in easily through the walls) into the night. No place in Lexington is particularly scary, as compared to big cities, but for the area, it’s about as sketchy as you’d want. There is no real signage and it can be hard to find. When you walk in you’ll stand huddled in a little alcove with a bench. There you will wait for a long time for anyone to acknowledge that you have arrived. It doesn’t matter if you have reservations, it doesn’t matter if you have eaten there fairly often, it doesn’t matter if you are in a rush, or have kids, or if there are empty tables. There is no waiting list that I saw, and no hostess station or such. You’ll wait until someone feels like dealing with you. Most folks who eat here seem to know this and wait quite patiently.
When one of the nice folks working there decides you should sit, you will be ushered into one of two rooms. One is the standard sushi bar type room with some seats at the bar and some tables — just what you might expect. Through the curtain, however, you’ll be slipping out of your shoes to walk up a few wooden stairs into a more traditional Japanese dining area where you’ll be sitting on the floor at one of the 4 or so larger tables segregated into little alcoves. The tables do have the well area under the table cut out so you can actually drop your legs down there, so it’s not the total experience, but you get the idea. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this part of the restaurant is in any better repair than the «regular» dining room — it is just as in need of a good scrub, decluttering, and coat of paint as the rest of the establishment, but it’s a different feel. For example, when was the last time you saw a laser disc (no, not DVD, old school bigggg discs) karaōke machine? It doesn’t look like it has seen any use this decade (though I could be wrong) but there it sits, at the end of the longest table, which could probably seat 18. In my experience the folks who get past that curtain into the shoeless area are the folks who are Japanese, look Japanese, look like serious businessmen, large groups, or have specifically requested one of those tables when they made their reservations. But don’t worry if you don’t get taken behind the curtain, the service and the food are the same regardless of where you sit, as far as I can tell.
This brings us to the service in general. The staff members are quite nice, cordial and congenial, but they are also very quiet, and the restaurant in general seems wildly understaffed. I was there on a Tuesday night at 7 pm, for example, and there were 2 servers and one sushi chef at the bar. As you might imagine, this makes for very, very slow service at every point. You will wait to be seated, you will wait for drinks, you will wait to order, you will wait for your food to be delivered. Your food will come in whatever order it is prepared, and not all at once. I’ve had one entrée arrive an hour after the first was delivered to our table. This is not a place to wait for everyone to be served before you start.
All that said, once you do get your food it will be tasty. It won’t be phenomenal, but it will be very good. The menu is extensive and sticks to actual Japanese fair without too much Americanization. There are lots of pictures, but you may need to consult your server for specific info. If you are really into Japanese food you may well find it quite average, but around these parts it passes for quite exotic.
I was pleased with my sushi and nigiri choices. The marinaded tuna is particularly tasty. That said, I was troubled to note that much of the food has not been cut into small enough pieces. When one is only supplied with chopsticks, a piece of tuna that needs to be cut in half is an issue. This was also true of a couple of the pieces of nigiri, one of which was easily 3 bites for an adult. Perhaps I am just lacking in my cut-​it-​with-​a-​chopstick skills, but I found even the tasty tuna was unwieldy in 5″ x 2″ pieces.
The price is reasonable for the quality of the food. The seafood was fresh, lower-​priced fish wasn’t subbed in unannounced as it is in so many establishments, and the tempura udon is only $ 10 for a rather large bowl of noodles (but only two shrimp tempura). Good sushi isn’t cheap and I didn’t think the prices were out of line for the quality, though they were high for the atmosphere, if you know what I mean.
In closing, if you’ve never gone, you should go as an adventure at least once. Subsequent trips really depend on your own personality and preferences.

I’ve been to this restaurant several times while visiting this state and I must say I have always left with a good taste in my mouth. Although it is situated in a somewhat sketchy location, (a run-​down strip mall behind a gas station), the food and service never disappointed me. My meal of choice was always the Tempura Shrimp and Oyokadon and was always presented to me beautifully.
Highly recommended and would definitely visit again and again.

I am super mad at you Unilocalers right now — you ruined my Saturday night dinner with my husband. This is easily the worst restaurant we have been to since moving to Lexington. Let me explain why:
1. The staff in a restaurant should at least pretend to have a little regard for their customers. From the moment we walked in, it was clear that no one working here cared at all. No one greeted us, no one offered us a seat, it took forever to get menus and drinks, etc. Tables weren’t turned over even though people were waiting to be seated. The servers all had a sullen attitude and seemed to have complete disregard for everyone.
2. There is zero atmosphere in this place. Now, I don’t need a place to be all fancy shmancy — I enjoy a good dive. But this place is just terrible — bright fluorescent lights, junk piled up on the sushi bar, etc. For some reason, many of you think this makes the place «authentic.» Have you been to Japan? I didn’t think so.
3. When I order food, I actually expect to get it. BEFORE the restaurant closes. It took at least 15 or 20 minutes for someone to simply pick up our paper sushi sheet with our order on it. It was then AN HOUR before we received the first part of our order. It was all sushi — no cooked food. It didn’t help that the sushi chef wasn’t preparing food in the order it came in — he kept mixing up the sushi sheets and making whatever he felt like making when he felt like making it.
The sushi was good (although expensive), but not exceptional (the nigiri was definitely better than the rolls). However, we would never eat here again — this restaurant needs a complete overhaul.

Eating in the Far East (land)
As it is just off of Eastland drive, Sugano’s gives off s smoky, backstreets of Tokyo feel with fresh sushi as close to the Tsukiji Fish Market as Lexington can get. The menu is wide and varied. It allows for sushi lovers and their cooked food counterparts to both come to a Japanese restaurant and get good food.
Roasted samba or other fish, tempura, ramen, ocha-​zuki, and vegetarian along with several other food options are all well done in an atmosphere of back-​alley Japan. Just a note on the sushi, the ratio of fish is much higher than rice on the nigri. It is great to experience a little Japan in Lexington.
Kampai!

By far the best sushi place I have eaten at in town. Don’t let the strip mall location fool you. Got some spicy tuna rolls and the fatty tuna roll. My wife got tuna sashimi and tuna rolls. By far the freshest tuna I have seen in a long time just melted in your mouth.

I checked out the menu on Unilocal and scrolled through the pictures. I was absolutely transfixed on ordering the sea squirt. And any place with great reviews was destined to be great, right?
Wrong. They do get busy so be prepared to wait. I am all for waiting for a seat, because that usually indicates a good meal is in my near future. Not the case tonight. Once I got seated, I was never given chopsticks, I had to ask two different servers for tea, and it took more than 30 minutes for my cold sushi bar items to come out and once they got to me, they were warm. This is negligence on behalf of the servers because the sushi master behind the bar was throwing it out like lightening. The plates stacked up, and up, and up. While my particular server shambled around stretching his arms and yawning.
The sea squirt was very fresh, it was well chilled, and had a good flavor. My yellowtail handroll was pretty tasteless and bland. The uni on the other hand… to me… uni defines the greatness of a sushi restaurant. If you can deliver fresh, cold, great tasting uni… you have succeeded. Sea urchin reveals all your dirty secrets. This urchin was so bad, I couldn’t even swallow the second piece. Luckily I had ordered the tuna, which actually had a decent flavor. So that and a lot of ginger helped settle my stomach.
All in all, there is a lot of hype for absolutely no good reason when it comes to the actual sushi. Their other options looked tasty, but as was proved to me tonight, looks can be decieving.

As far as getting shushi in Lexington I have to recommend this Restaurant! The Chef is extremely proficient in his presentation of the food. The staff are all professional to say ! they are the Most courteous in town. Obscure dishes like sea squirt and wasabi greens can be obtained here, so know your stuff when you order!
Everything is Fresh Fresh FRESH! Thank you for providing this experience! You are hard to find but ohhhhh so worth it!

Sugano restaurant is Lexington hidden gem. If you crave to eat Japanese food — comes to no other than this place. Very authentic. The location is not so great but once you are inside — feels right away like in real Japanese sushi bar (I meant literary being in Japan).
Almost everyone speak Japanese off course beside English. Food is very fresh and tasty. Friendly environment.
It is my first time to this restaurant despite multiple times visitting Lexington — found because of Unilocal.
I’m impressed with the level of authenticity of this restaurant in the unexpected place. Great taste too with some varieties of food not found in typical sushi restaurant in US.
Apparently the chef, Mr. Sugano is an executive chef from Japan who comes here and start this restaurant.
All food I ordered — marinated firefly squid, fermented squid, boiled tuna skin with ponzu sauce, air dried fish bones, chirashi, and off course the super cold kirin draft are excellent.
Definitely recommended place to visit even if you just drive by Lexington and looking for Japanese restaurant — you should TRY.
Note — only open for dinner.