Bonzai Japanese Steak and Sushi

do not go here unless you ask for meagan and drew.
i just paid $ 17.00 for a drink. the manager all of a sudden didn’t speak english. the chinese manager who scams people.
the food is good. however, dragon, the manager will scam from you!!!
there’s a better place next door. more fresh also.

If you want fun… you have to ask for «Sexy Manny» as your chef!!! Laughed all the way thru dinner and he was awesome with the tween!!!
Food was great, service was great… what a treat!

Best hibachi I have ever had. Best sushi rolls ever. Good people. Waiters and waitresses have a personality. Love Kerrville.

Went to Bonzai’s after waiting half an hour for a table at Francisco’s, and we were glad for the decision. The food is amazing, the service wonderful, and it was quiet enough to have a decent conversation. I got the salmon, my brother ordered ribeye steak — beautiful food and plenty of it! This restaurant is definitely at the very TOP of my list.

Can’t go wrong when choosing this place for a nice night out. Good food good drinks great atmosphere and the show is amazing.

We had a a great chef and waiter and the food was good too! Would definitely return when in the area.

We had the hibachi. I had the filet and chicken and added scallops and noodles. Very good!
The 4 of us were happy with the food, and it would of received 5 stars, however, the chef forgot our vegetables and we had to ask for them.
They were appologetic.
We’ll be back.

Great food and service! Throughly enjoyed the experience!

Yall. I dreaded moving back to Fredericksburg because I knew I would never get the quality sushi I had in Austin. I WAS SO WRONG! I have been to Bonzai several times and each time I have walked away sooo happy and sooo satisfied.
The drink selection is really, really great and they actually know how to make them and for the price they do not stiff you on the liquor (this is obviously important to me). The specialty rolls are well thought out and there is a huge selection. You can’t go wrong with any of them.
My boyfriend and I went one time on Valentines day… the most dreaded day of the year for servers. We waited for over an hour (expected) and ended up running into friends and on such a crazy night the host conjoined our parties and got us all a habachi grill together. For 10pm on Valentine’s our chef was in a great mood and made the experience fun and memorable. Our server was the cutest, sweetest girl, I don’t remember her name but she was tatted up was really personable with our table, we all loved her :)
Overall — I’ve had an awesome experience every time, the food, drinks and service are all really great and I know I don’t have to go alllll the way to the big city to find the food I love the most.

Great food! Great service at the grill! Funny cooks! Always a good time. They are pricey but most sushi is! Love going here for birthdays and such! Such a nice change to all other restaurants in town!

OMG!!! While higher priced than I allow myself but worth every penny and the wait. The lobster roll is one of the most beautiful and delicious things I have every had. It has only been about 3 months since I started eating sushi but I am so thankful for Bonzai. Kuddos to Jacob and his entire staff. They ROCK. You guys have salvaged my faith in humanity.

Really great food! The Hitachi dinners are around $ 20, but they come with so much food! The fried rice was some of the best any of us had. The scallops and filet mignon were melt-​in-​your-​mouth delicious!

Great sushi!, can’t complain about anything! Must try there salmon and fried rice dish! It’s amazing!!!

They did a great job with the décor, it’s hard to believe that it’s the same building as the old Gatti’s. The service was friendly and I was served promptly
I really enjoyed the Hibachi chicken and steak dinner. The chef’s presentation was great and my kid’s really enjoyed the show. Their fried rice is delicious. The soup is a bit plain, but isn’t bad.
I do not enjoy sushi, so i cannot give any opinion as to it’s quality at Bonzai’s

You have to give credit where credit is due. Obviously you won’t have big city quality sushi in a little podunk town that’s claim to fame is HEB and some guy that won some kind of big important football trophy. Bonzai is good for what it is, so comparing it to LA or other places that actually have an Asian population is unfair.
Bonzai has great sushi for people who haven’t had sushi before. The Sunshine Roll is popular. The Geisha Roll is great as well, but it’s fried, has avocado, cream cheese, and other fillings so although my mouth is watering thinking about it right now, it’s SOOOO filling. It’s enough to suffice as a meal.
As far as the other dishes go, why not sit at the hibachi grills? People tend to avoid those, but it’s much more fun to watch the chefs prepare your food. They’re all really friendly.
There are lunch specials everyday, drink specials everyday besides weekends, and plenty of new things to try. There’s a sushi happy hour Monday-​Friday, from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm, where all rolls are half off. I’m excited to go back home and get a geisha roll.

I’m grateful for late night food available (ahem, that’s 9 pm for this part of middle of nowhere, TX). My bf and I come here when we stay in Utopia (FoxFire cabins) and since we eat pretty late, this is our only option out here besides fast food.
Their drinks are STRONG, especially if you decide to have one of the signature cocktails on empty stomach while waiting on your sushi order.
Tip: if you order the lobster roll, it REALLY does take 30 mins, like they warn you. It’s surely delicious, but not worth starving for half hour. Get the Geisha roll instead – now that’s a splendid delicacy right there! It’s fully cooked, not raw. Anything with eel is also a good bet.
Staff can be hit or miss and I can feel they’re trying to please. I’m a tough one because I drink hot tea by the gallon and require lots of check ups for hot water refills, so they usually forget to do that after 1^st cup. Staff comprises of young kids and they got their own hangout goin’ by the bar.
Hey, they fed us at 9.45 pm right before close, so who am I to complain too much. ;)

Good Food, Ignorant Service, Unfriendly Tablemates
My husband and I are from Austin. We had to be in Kerrville for a family situation and went to Bonzai the Saturday evening before Easter. We enjoy hibachi-​style eating, as it’s fun to mingle with the other guests. Unfortunately, the other guests would not even make eye contact, much less say hello.
My husband explained to our harried waitress that we needed to have our food grilled using no salt and no soy; he is on a low-​sodium diet due to a heart condition. Most restaurants are happy to accommodate us. But the waitress gave us a look that could melt ice. She slapped down the menus and ran off; it appeared she may have been the only order taker that night. She scurried table to table and when she came back, she barely gave us time to figure out if we wanted sushi as a starter, or what was on the hibachi menu.
Next out comes Mr. Macho chef to do the hibachi show. Well, he absolutely FREAKED OUT when he read that we wanted him to grill our steak and seafood using no salt or soy. Seems like a simple task. I do it all the time, but this guy gave us all kinds of grief, saying how he could not guarantee the taste of the food and how he was going to have to mix our vegetables separately from the other guests as though that would kill him. For the entrees, I suggested that he could use sesame oil, pepper, lemon or garlic, just omit the salt and soy, but this guy was clueless. My husband was so pissed off at his attitude toward me, we almost got up to leave.
He complained throughout the preparation, at one time muttering about «this confusing table.» He couldn’t figure out how to simply grill our stuff on one corner of the grill and mix/​grill everybody else’s in the middle. So he used a vacant hibachi table behind him and grumbled about having to do that.
I ordered my tenderloin medium, and my husband wanted his fish simply seared. This guy had no clue how to cook anything other than well done. In fact, I had to urge him to pull our entrees off the grill. Although both were overdone, the food itself was very high quality beef and fish. We did enjoy the taste of the food.
After the chef grumbled a half-​hearted goodbye, the harried waitress came back and asked us if we wanted dessert. Evidently she didn’t want us to have any, since we had to ask her what the desserts were. She rattled them off so fast, I had to ask her again for the list, much to her dismay. We wound up having some red tea ice cream which was very good.
We are well-​traveled people who enjoy fine dining. We usually tip very well, but we left a $ 5 tip, a stunt we’ve never pulled before. I don’t know if Kerrville is quite ready for sophisticated diners. And as for the Kerrvillians who surrounded the table with us, all I can say is, «How about at least smiling at people who are sitting at the same table as you?»

This is one of my sister’s favorite places but she and I don’t exactly see eye to eye on what constitutes a good meal. We were both put off by the wait, not the wait for a table but the wait for someone to finally come over and take our drink order. I had to ask for a sushi menu. When my order came out I was disappointed that my roll was made with imitation crab. Had this been listed as such on the menu, I would have never ordered it. I ate what I could and when I mentioned it to the waitress I was informed that the ingredients were only listed on their to-​go menus. How this would have helped me as an in house diner, I do not know, but I asked for one anyway and it was actually not listed there either. It is though, a step up from what was there before. I liked Gattis well enough but it was always so dirty. I will give Bonzai another try, just not any time soon.

For a sushi restaurant in the middle of a small Texas town, better than what I expected.
I was a little nervous going in… I live in Los Angeles, so we have some REALLY good sushi restaurants. But Bonzai was not bad. The sushi actually comprises the smaller portion of their menu. The bulk of what they serve is cooked food… even most of the rolls are cooked. I guess that’s not too surprising for a small town Texas sushi joint where eating raw fish may not be something that most people have done before.
I can only talk to the cooked food… we ended up not getting anything raw ourselves (I guess we chickened out?). The Clear Soup that came first was great! A welcome change to miso, which I’m not really a fan of anyway. Chris had a lunch combo that involved scallops, shrimp and rice. It was fine. I had the Dragon roll (eel on a California roll). Even though the menu said crab, it was imitation krab. In LA if it says crab, it’s real crab, so that was a disappointment. But otherwise it was fine.
If you’re afraid of sushi, this is a perfectly safe place to go. There are plenty of cooked options for the less adventurous.

Kerrville has not kept up with such great metropolitan cities such as Amarillo and Lubbock. We don’t have a Japanese Steak House.
Well, Bonzai changed that and much for the better!
While one doesn’t think of this food when you think of Texas it does seem to be almost required for a modern Texas city of any self self respect to have at least one Japanese Steak House.
With BBQ and Mexican why do we need a Japanese Steak House?
Well, in answer to that I may find myself unceremoniously ejected from Texas for saying it, there is only so much BBQ and Mexican a body can eat.
I’m still here? Ok, let’s get on to Bonzai!
For those unfamiliar with Japanese Steakhouse cuisine you need to visit, at least once. This isn’t just food. It’s dinner and a show. It’s the making of dinner AS the show. The chefs are 1 part P.T. Barnum, 1 part juggler and 1 part Gallagher with a knife. The food is brought to your table raw and prepared on a large hot cooking surface called an hibachi. Steak, chicken, seafood, vegetables and rice are combined and cooked before your eyes to create a major meal that is also major in flavor. There are two sauces supplied for dipping your meat in, one sweet, the other hot mustard based.
Years ago while visiting I went to the Japanese steak house in Amarillo and was disappointed. I’d previously been to a very good on in Columbus, OH, so I was not ignorant of the show or the food. The one in Amarillo at that time was a disappointment.
Bonzai is not disappointing. It is great for both presentation and for quality of the food.
The other menu items include the best sushi in Kerrville, bar none. If you only know the sushi from HEB then you don’t know good sushi. There was no comparison in quality. HEB sushi is like HEB pizza. It’s ok, but it’s not the best. This is the best sushi in Kerrville.
You can also get temupra items Tempura consists of meats, seafood and vegetables dipped into a special batter and quick-​deep fried. It does not get as oily as much of the deep fried food we serve in Texas. It is dipped in a special, light sauce.
If you want something new, something different, something you couldn’t get just a short time ago then get to Bonzai Steak & Sushi!