Samurai Japanese Steak

This is a great place for families with younger kids. The Ichiban Chefs make the meal preparation a lot more interesting, sure to excite your kids. They have good service, clean restrooms, and artsy platesThe food overall is fair quality. Their steak fillets are always cooked basically perfect, but all the food is always too hot and lacking flavor.
More fun than fine dining but the food is still good quality.

I have ventured far and wide and all over Houston in search of good sushi, and Samurai takes the cake. The service is consistently great; I see the same sushi chef here every time, and I’m convinced he’s some sort of wizard. We once asked him to make us a creative roll with whatever he pleased, and he presented us with an artful masterpiece of fish that was SO delicious I dreamt of it later. I haven’t had a roll that was disappointing yet, but favorites include: Ozzy, American Hero, No Name, Red Moon, Nasa, Jalapeño roll, I could go on for days. To come here solely for hibachi is doing yourself a disservice.

Have tried this several times. Food ok service disappointing. To say the least. Perhaps a shot of friendliness as servers greet customers would help.
Won’t try again.

This place is awesome! Fresh sushi, great happy hour specials. American Hero roll is amazing! Waitstaff is so nice and our waiter took the time to explain what everything was to my 7 year old, who ate everything on the table! Great place, new go-​to !

The food is great, cooked to perfection and fresh! The atmosphere is clean and inviting. Pricier than Ichibon but respectively since it is better quality. Go on Sundays and the specials are perfect.

My wife and I ate here last night and the service was outstanding, but that all the good we could find in this place. We both love hibachi, and have eaten it all over the country and this place is at the bottom. First we shared a California Roll, which was okay, but very small and you only get four. The food was very bland, there was no flavor. We ate at the hibachi grill and the chef was entertaining but very difficult to understand. Overall we will not go back.

First time actually having hibachi style lunch or dinner (we went for lunch). I am not really impressed by the «shows» when it comes to food and I am quite impatient along with «bring the food» mentality. It’s a good choice if you want to impress someone for lunch/​dinner, but if you’re hungry and wanting to eat, you’re SOL. The service was pretty good given the fact that they weren’t that busy.
On to the food, we ordered almost the whole menu, so I got to sample out almost all the variation for hibachi lunch. The sauce that they put out was decent. I prefer the spicier one because it actually has flavor. The scallop was cooked perfectly, but not flavorful. The lobster was overcooked and not fresh. I got the chicken terriyaki, but they added mushrooms which I’m not use to at all. I’m not a fan of regular mushrooms and only prefer oyster, enoki, and shiitake so needless to say, I didn’t even touch the mustrooms that came with the chicken terriyaki. The terriyaki sauce was probably house-​made and really sweet. I rather they just do the store bought kind which will be pretty consistent and straight-​forward.
My coworker and I agreed that Ichiban is in fact better and slightly cheaper. It will be my first and last coming here unless my other coworkesr would like to come again.

I think it is crazy when you go to a sushi place and struggle to find more than 3 rolls with raw fish… leave the cooked crab meat to the grocery store sushi!
However, the hibachi is nice and my family had a great time celebrating my sister’s birthday, cheesy jokes and all!

This is my husband and I’s go to sushi place. The sushi is the freshest I have found in Houston and we refuse to go anywhere for sushi other than here. We always get the pepper tuna sushi with fried garlic and green onions on top. The house salad with the ginger dressing is also one of my favorites. The wait staff is extremely nice and never lets your drinks go empty. Definitely a winner!

Better off going to ichiban. Sub par food and super boring show.
My son enjoyed his kids meal, but the rest of us were unimpressed. I got the steak and chicken. My steak and chicken were both overcooked and my steak was super fatty. Everything was lacking in flavor. Sad because I really wanted to like it!

Their happy hour and lunch specials are great! The crab sticks with wasbi mayo are worth the drive alone. The only reason I gave them four stars is the two times I’ve ordered a drink from here they were pretty awful.

The environment is very welcoming and the staff is friendly. The calamari had a strong fishy smell to it but it was just the sauce they put on it. But none the less, it exceeded my expectations. The sushi was okay but it wasn’t bad. All in all, I was satisfied

Nice atmosphere with a cute bar sitting area. Delicious food prepared in an entertaining way (when ordering hibachi).
We ordered the calamari hibachi, my favorite, which was cooked to perfection! The sushi is clean & not overloaded with rice. I recommend the salmon sashimi which is thinly sliced and fresh.

This place was amazing! Courteous and knowledgeable staff. Very clean and has a nice ambiance. The portion sizes are smaller than we are used to, but the quality was amazing!!! Worth the money!

This is my second time eating here and the this time it was wayyy better. The first time we are here, we came at night and the area had no lights, and you could not see the inside (which made it seemed like it was closed) It looked really suspicious and shady. Also, when we asked the hostesses what they recommended, it seemed they were reccomending random things, saying «oh, everything is good!» When I’m pretty sure they had no idea what they were talking about.
But this time it was WAY better. The host was nice and friendly. And the person who cooked in front of us told us what he was cooking (unlike last time!). He was actually pretty funny. The highlights were the onion volcano, the I U sign (which he put his his spatula under the heart to make it look like it was beating LOL), etc. Even the little things were funny, like when he poured some oil on the grill and wrote out «OIL». He also asks if you want to catch a rice ball in your mouth, but they do that every time.
The food was AMAZING. The appetizers: mushroom soup and salad was good, except the salad had too much sauce on it (like last time too.) I ordered this «special crunch sushi», which the host said was one of the favorites. It came with A LOT of «special crunch», and I ate it all. The guy who cooked in front of us made: fried rice, lobster, scallop, filet mignon, chicken, pork, steak, zucchini and onions, and bean sprouts. Everything was delicious! I especially loved the scallops. They were soft, juicy, YUMMY. I also like the zucchini. The sauce he made with the lobster tasted exactly like cheese! I think it was just butter and lemon with something else, though. Oh, I forgot to add: in the very beginning he made sauces– one for seafood, one for meat. I recommend only dipping a little bit each time. It was a bit strong for my taste.
Overall, the food was amazing, the cook was funny and talented, and the service was friendly!

This is my personal favorite although I will say I haven’t been there in a couple of months so I don’t know if anything has changed. Everything always seemed fresh and delicious. THE tiger roll, temptation roll are my two favorites. I wish it was closer to me so I could go every day.

As with many places, you sometimes don’t know how good a place is until there’s a problem, and then you see how they handle it. Well… we finally had a problem and this restaurant just didn’t handle it well at all. Then we gave them a second chance, and they didn’t do well at that either.
So what went wrong? Well, let’s start with, if I’d written this review a year ago, it would have been a glowing five-​star review. But something about this place has changed recently. Not only is the food-​quality worse than it used to be, but the place just isnt’ as clean as it used to be either.
That’s where or most recent visit started wrong. We were seated at a hibachi table that was just filthy. There was fried rice stuck in the corners and grease on the table itself. The grill grate was just nasty, nasty, and there was food on the floor where the chef cooks and stands. There was also grease dripping from the venthoods above our heads.
Used to, ice cream was offered for free as part of the meal and so was hot tea. They apparently no longer offer free ice cream with the meal and no free tea.
The waiter was quite rude and acted as though he didn’t want to be there or else didn’t want US to be there. We weren’t given an option for the dressing on our salads, so he brought us the peanut dressing and I wanted ginger. i asked for it to be sent back and to have the ginger dressing instead, but then he took it back and never brought me the salad back. He also never brought us the bowls of soup.
The food and the chef were good. Though it seems the portions have gotten much smaller since we first found this place. The chefs are always pretty good. We’ve never had a bad chef.
But their management stinks. And I don’t mean that in a literal sense… I’m sure they smell fine. But they are rude. The female manager I spoke with both times I had an issue was simply unwilling to admit they had done anything wrong and it was somehow our fault that the waiter forgot to bring us soup, of that he didn’t ask what dressing we wanted, or that he took the soy sauce and salt and pepper and sugar off the table before the meal was over (because he claimed they were closing, even though it was 20 minutes prior to closing time), or that he was rushing us and didn’t bother to ask if we wanted dessert (which we did, because we love the green tea ice cream), and it was our fault, apparently, we didn’t get the hot green tea we were supposed to get.
After being treated quite rudely by one of the female managers, she finally agreed to discount our bill by $ 10. Unfortunately, between the cleanliness declining, the portions decreasing, the poor management, and just an overall change in the restaurant, we probably won’t bother to go back again and will look for a better place in the future for hibachi.
As for wheelchair accessibility – well, any place that does double entry doors (where you walk in one door and then immediately have to open and walk through another) makes it very difficult for people with wheelchairs to enter. The logistics of it are that a person in a wheelchair usually needs someone to hold the door for them, but then if they go through into the vestibule and can’t open the second door, the person holding the first door can’t get around them to get to the second door. So entry is a little awkward, but it’s do-​able. If you sit at most of the tables, the wheelchair fits– but a few of the tables near the walls will make manuevering difficult because there’s just not enough space between the wall and the table, and to make it worse, they sometimes line the walls with unused chairs. Lastly, access to the bathroom is down a long corridor, where they also line the corridor with unused chairs, making the corner turn really difficult with a wheelchair. I can make it with my electric chair, but not with my manual one. My family member had to move all the chairs to allow me to pass.

Sometimes you get a chef here that is just bored with his job and just puts on the bare minimum show, unfortunately that is what we got. It is okay with me because I have been to these cook at your table places a million times but it is sad for newcomers and kids. My grand daughter is little to young at 8 months to really appreciate a good show and I hope by time she is old enough they will have hired some more enthusiastic chefs.
Food was ok. We had filet and shrimp and chicken. Chicken was dried out but filet was tender. I like their salad dressing here but still miss my favorite dressing from Mikados in Huntsville Alabama! Roll Tide!

We go here about once every six months or so, because it too expensive for people who eat out every meal. I don’t do fish so we always do the hibachi table.
Occasionally we go to Ichibon. The two seem about the same but I like the salad here better. As I say in a lot of reviews, for me salad is a socially acceptable transport medium for dressing and I like the dressing here.
I’ve dinged them one star because sometimes the servers aren’t very friendly and occasionally the steak is a little tough.
We normally share a filet mignon with fried rice which is what we did tonight. The steak was tender and tasty. The drive-​out price for one meal shared was a little less than $ 40.
It’s a lot more pleasant when the other diners at your table are gregarious, which was moderately so tonight. Sometimes they’re fun and sometimes entirely uncommunicative.
Other reviews mention the volcano and I caught a good picture tonight.
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We’ve Eaten Out Every Meal for 25 years

I gave this place a try based on the majority of reviews. It was a pleasant surprise when I walked in and found out they had Hibachi style cooking. Food was great but being from Jersey and having eating at Hibachi style restaurants there, you get more types of side dishes with your meat. I also love to put a lot of garlic on this type of food and this place didn’t have any garlic to provide.
Could use some improvements but over all it was good.