Chai Ko Tapas

I’ve eaten here multiple times, and always enjoyed my meal. The food is delicious, and the staff was helpful. The only reason I left off a star is because despite their name, they are not a tapas restaurant.

Bland, flavorless sushi. I will not be eating at Chai Ko in the future.

I went tonight with my family. The service was terrible. The restaurant was not even half full and we were given a table on top of a large family who had a toddler running around the group. My daughter had to go ask a waitress to take our order. Soup course served with the main meal. All of the food was tasteless. My sushi roll had more rice than fish and was drowning in sweet sauce.
What a huge disappointment from a year ago!

Their Thai Steak is really good!

Sushi is portioned well, good prices, and the fish tastes great.
Their soups are usually an experiences. Ranging in size and flavor they can be a conversation starter the second they reach your table.
This is a nice quiet place for a date, a family engagement (they seat large numbers), or a Small work meeting.
Didn’t really see tapas on the menu.
Anyone who knows me knows that I believe that Unilocal should be a resources for Owners and Managers. Not just a place for people to complain. I like when people offer real world solutions. All this is constructive and supportive of what you are trying to do here. With that in mind, here are some things you may want to work on.
AREAS OF IMPROVEMENT:
1. Phone message should be existent. Sometimes when we call the number doesn’t even work. Use
if you want to have a professional easy to use phone messaging and answering service. They are a cheap service that will make you sound more professional and help you earn more business even when you can’t spare the time to answer the phone.
2. ORDER. If your staff doesn’t understand how to put things out in a specific order that’s ok. Just have them ask this simple question «In what order would like that to come out». Completely legitimate question that asks what is necessary.
3. Tea! Have tea for people who are waiting or who are already seated. It occupies people so they don’t notice if your servers are busy. Maybe even do the mint leaf lemon nana tea that I miss from Israel. Its small things like this that turn the mundane into an experience.
4. Clean Menus please. The corners were browned by something. That just shouldn’t be.
5. You’re BYO… make a deal with the local liquor store. Tell people which store to go to before they arrive. Tell people this when they make reservations. You can even give the store your reservation sheet and say people who come into your store who are on the sheet can get a discount. It’ll drive business for both stores. (brainstorming here…)
All in all, there is room for improvement. Will you take this the wrong way? Ignore it and just move onward? Maybe. But I hope you read this as the valuable customer feedback which can help your restaurant.
Don’t let success of your other restaurant make you weak. Fight to be the best in everything you do.
We’ll see you soon.

While the service was lacking (things took quite some time and the waitress wasn’t quite so knowledgable), the food was delicious. Very fresh (the sushi was fabulous) and satisfying. I’d go again.

Usually seeing a place only has one review I’ll usually figure I can kind of discount that review, but Chai Ko may have made me rethink this. We decided to go here after we had originally planned to go to Madres, but it was closed. I was looking on Unilocal as we came across this place and said only one review and it was bad, how bad could it really be?
We decided to go because we saw Tapas and Sushi, both of which sounded great. As the other reviewer said there’s no tapas here. We ordered some sushi, soup, appetizers, and a main. There really was no order to how things came out. A sushi dish would come out, then a soup, another sushi dish with an appetizer, another order of sushi, and finally after about 15 – 20 minutes the main came out as everyone was finishing up. The service wasn’t very good and my water glass was empty more than it had water in it. As we’re finishing up dinner a few people are dragging trashcans full of flattened boxes through the dining room, right past our table. Maybe we should take them out the back or wait until the place closes, but it was pretty loud and disruptive.
The food was decent (3 star), but I don’t think I’ll be back anytime soon.

Unfortunately I am unable to review the food in this joint as we did not get to sit down. As with most restaurants in Bergen County, this one has no liquor license, so we brought our own bottle of wine. Upon entry, the host (mettre d’kosher?) asked us if the wine was kosher, which it wasn’t, so he politely, but firmly explained to us the impossibility of sitting down to dine with a non-​kosher bottle of wine.
At this point my wife and I made a bee line for he door as we are averse to having our wine judged as a prerequisite for sitting down at an off-​the-​map suburban dining establishment.

I have to agree with the above review. Our experience was almost identical. My family went to Chai Ko Tapas this past summer with high expectations. While we were waiting for our table, the manager at the cash register insulted the waitress right in front of us. While we were eating, a heated argument ensued between the manager and a customer. On top of that, when our food finally arrived, there was an insect in my daughter’s soup (no joke), which they replaced without an apology, as though it happens all the time. The sushi, priced as though it were a main entrée, consisted of three small pieces. The other food tasted fine, but we won’t be returning to Chai Ko Tapas in the foreseeable future.

I took my sister to chai ko tapas earlier this summer and we were not very impressed by the food. contrary to its name, there are, in fact, no tapas at this restaurant– which certainly seemed strange. for appetizers, we ordered sushi, which took forever to come out because there was only one sushi chef for a restaurant fill of patrons. for my main, I got the hangar steak, which was decent but certainly nothing to write home about. my sister got a vegetarian dish that was fine, but certainly had a hefty price tag considering it consisted of a few cutup vegetables and noodles. the noise level throughout our meal was absurd– lots of little babies running around this place. Also I found the typos in the menu to be really unprofessional. I mean why does it still say pre passover menu on the menu? Also the host/​mashgiach at the time was very rude and didn’t seem to be aware of how loud he was. Definitely does not add to the ambiance of a quiet high class restaurant.
The only redeeming factor was our waiter, Josh, who not only delighted us with tales of his music career, but also was very quick and efficient in providing us amazing service. If it wasn’t for him, I would have stormed out and not paid for our meal (and justifiably so). He seemed to be the only one who had ever worked in a restaurant before. I mean even the owner looked confused and lost in his own restaurant.
Honestly they should change the name of the restaurant, start anew, and only keep that red headed angel but promote him to manage the place.

If you’re looking for ambiance, good service, or, I don’t know, good food, then please, for the love of all that is good and holy, skip this place. If you want Chinese, go to Chopstix. If you want sushi, go to Sushi Metsuyan. If you want tapas, well, you’re out of luck.
The husband and I tried to go to Chai shortly after they opened more than two months ago, but they were packed, the guy running the joint couldn’t seem to help us, and we thought, you know, we’ll come back. So we did. But I really wish we had gone somewhere else.
The ambiance of the restaurant was nice. By this I mean the ceiling is cool, and the Asian-​style decore is on-​par for what the restaurant promises, but the manager yelling at his wait staff, a customer yelling at the manager, the guy behind the counter yelling «This shouldn’t be happening!» and people generally freaking out about what was bad service regarding someone’s appetizer made for an incredibly uncomfortable situation. And our waiter? Let’s just say he was tightly wound. He complained about how he was going to be able to eat until 10 p.m. and kept saying he’d help us and then get distracted with something else. Overall the service was … weird and uncomfortable.
I ordered the Chi Chi Chicken, which they offer in a gluten-​free variety. I was super excited about this, and I anticipated what the menu offered — some delicious veggies with chicken and a spicy brown sauce. What I got was the most bland food I’ve had in my life — more bland even than steamed chicken. Sigh. It was completely flavorless, and I really don’t know what kind of sauce was on it because I could see it, but not taste it. I even had the husband try it, to no tasty avail. The husband’s duck dish was tough, but the roasted potatoes were pretty good.
So, I guess that’s all I have to offer: Some tasty roasted potatoes.
If you’re jonesing for roasted potatoes, go here. I really wish I had gotten the sushi, because the only likable fellow in the joint was the sushi chef who said «Have a good night» as I left.
The point? This restaurant might be kosher, but the food is subpar and the name of the restaurant flat out lies. There’s no tapas here and I don’t know what kind of fusion it’s supposed to be offering.