Wa San Mai

Overall experience is that the price is expensive but is a fair price for the food quality. The venue is nice and comfortable. They have a great variety of Japanese food style, including steaming, sushi, hot pot, grill and etc. Major issue I have with this restaurant is the service. The service was not as professional as the food and venue. They constantly asked if I have finished my meal to collect my plate. Yet I have still shrimps and soup on there. And they way they shown me the table was far from polite and rushed. It is like being in Japan, eating Japanese food, but yet receiving a Hong Kong style canteen food service. And the lunch course while complete and fulfilling, the dessert provided was a Chinese style coconut milk pudding, which was a failure as to give customer a complete Japanese food experience. Also, the beverage of choice for the lunch set include Lemon tea and lemon water!

Delish sweet shrimp sashimi. First lunch with my dad! Back into the Hk bound ~ can’t believe how much causeway bay changed, can’t even navigate.
Good sashimi in Hk~ better than Boston so much !! After Los Angeles food recovery, here is another foodie new trip :)

Wa San Mai is one of those meals where you exit the restaurant after a few hours a little bewildered by the real world. You might feel a little lost, a little disorientated by the light maybe, because for the last few hours you’ve been on a food journey unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before. But don’t get me wrong, it’s everything you’ve wanted to experience and more.
First off, a little context: Wa San Mai is huge — it’s like its own world on the 22^nd floor, covering over 10,000 square feet. There is a teppanyaki side, and a sushi/​standard dining side, and another area for settling the stomach.
A really wanted me to try the flying fish sashimi here first — mainly because they use the bones and head to make ‘chips’ more than the sashimi itself — so he asked the server straight off the bat. The server said that the fish hadn’t been flown in from Japan yet, but should be arriving in less than half an hour. I’m not sure whether this guy was making Wa San Mai seem more decadent than it already is, but it worked — I was impressed. Of course, we ordered this on top of the mountain of food we had ordered in our set, and were not disappointed — incredibly fresh, and with bone ‘chips’ that offered a completely different texture to the smooth sashimi.
As for our set… hedonism at its gastronomic extreme. To start, we had an abalone and shrimp amuse bouche. Followed by teppanyaki scallop, wagyu steak, sake clam soup, and lobster two ways — teppanyaki and soup. Everything was a masterful show of knifeskill and grill in front of us, by an expert teppanyaki chef. He later refused our cheers of Sake because he said he would be driving a motorcycle home that night, but we made sure to tell him how appreciative we were.
After all this, how could we do without the totally unnecessary but traditional ending of fried rice? After fried rice and nearly collapsing onto the hot steel into a food coma, we were taken to another room where we were allowed to indulge in green tea and sesame ice cream for as long as we pleased, accompanied ten minutes later by tea and coffee. This gave A and I a good chance to talk about how delicious and ridiculous that meal was.
Sidenote: they’ve also got those Japanese toilets that have warm up the seats and… um, intimately clean.

My first trip to Wa San Mai was a couple of years back and I haven’t found a Japanese restaurant that I deem better since. Wa San Mai is right in the middle of Causeway Bay, on the 22^nd floor of the building next to Sogo. It’s a pretty big restaurant and just the other day, I was directed to a table in a part of the restaurant that I had never even been in before! It was like a whole new discovery — I’ve been countless times and this literally was my first time in this secluded section of the restaurant! Each table had its own partitions that separate it from the other tables, making you feel like you are eating in a restaurant that’s all to yourself.
Anyway, my discovery whims aside, the food here is amazing. I’ve never been disappointed by anything here before, and that’s a bold statement to make but I stand by it. Most of the times that I’m here, I’m here for lunch, and they have a wonderful lunch menu ranging from a tempura set to a beef sukiyaki set (where you can choose the type of beef you’d like) to an assorted sushi set. The sets are all $ 150 and above, which judging by the amount of food you get is a steal. Take my favorite set — the restaurant’s namesake, the Wa San Mai set, as an example. To start with, you get a salad and a steamed egg. You get the bento box which is a little bit of everything — of sushi, of assorted tempura, sushi, of three kinds of sashimi etc. But that’s not all; besides miso soup you also get your choice of either soba and udon served either hot or cold. The set comes with complimentary dessert which is usually some sort of Japanese pudding or pastry, and hot/​iced coffee or tea. Add $ 10 and you can get either red bean, green tea or sesame ice cream. Seriously, this is so filling I feel like I don’t need to eat for the rest of the day when I’m done. And everything is so, so good too. With every bite, you can taste the freshness of the ingredients and you know they’re not giving you the cheapest stuff and loading it up with MSG.
I’ve tried the teppanyaki here which is good too, but I prefer going for the sets because the portions for the sets are much larger, and you get to sit at the comfortable booths as well. I would really recommend checking out Wa San Mai if you’ve never been before — I assure you won’t be disappointed. Be sure to make a booking at least a day in advance because I can’t guarantee they’ll have a table for you if you just walk in, especially if it’s a weekend!