Taiko Japanese Restaurant

Authentic Japanese cuisine. The sushi was outstanding. The ingredients were raw, fresh and flavorful. Make this part of your OBX experience.

This place has really good sushi, we had a wide variety of rolls and they we all tasty. If I were a local, I would definitely would go back

Very good, fresh, this is our go-​to sushi place in Nags Head! The Fantasy roll is one of my favs!

Standard sushi place. Good service and food, but nothing extraordinary. With a shellfish allergy, I found limited veggie sushi rolls on the menu but my partner enjoyed his special sushi rolls and enjoyed the wide variety of rolls with good prices. Good solid choice.

Great food, amazing service. Staff was awesome to my kids and the sushi and side dishes were made with attention and love. Feels like a family restaraunt and will definately be coming back. Thanks ! :)

My husband and I went here, ate the equivalent of a royal feast, all for under $ 50. Fresh wasabi and seafood, edamame, vegetable tempura, four different sushi rolls, hot saki and a crazy Japanese soda that took us five minutes to figure out how to open. Super friendly and eager staff with a quiet, comfortable and warm environment. Couldn’t recommend highly enough!

delicious sushi place in the Nags Head area of the Outer Banks. everything was fresh and every roll we ordered was delicious. they have great prices and great specials where you can mix and match rolls and get a lot of food for a really fair price. the wait staff was also amazing! so sweet and attentive. the highlight of the meal was one of their new appetizers, The Tsunami; sushi stuffed avocado. delicious!

I’m hard pressed to find anything bad to say about Taiko. For the beach, this is about as good as it gets when one wants Japanese. We usually get shumai and harumaki for appetizers, and my husband like chirashi, while I usually get something off the hibachi menu. The food is fresh, the wait staff is attentive, and they seem to run a decent take-​out business, although we have always eaten at the restaurant. And major plus: they are open in the off season, which is definitely good news for the locals.

One of my favorite Japanese Restaurant of the east coast… Taiko!
(The name Taiko is an Japanese drum instrument)
This place is a must visit, you won’t regret it!

My boyfriend and I were visiting from Baltimore for a wedding and decided we wanted some sushi. We saw this place and decided to give it a try. It doesn’t look like much, it’s in a strip mall, but it was clean, the sushi and sashimi were delicious and fresh and the service was good. Bottles of wine for only $ 15

Another example of how tastes differ from place to place. We decided to have an early dinner and used Unilocal to pick a place.
I ordered an avocado appraiser called Tsunami, which consisted of a hard avocado split in half topped with mixed fish and smothered with spicy mayo and about a half cup of Sriracha hot sauce, at $ 11+, I expected a bit more.
Next came my dinner, two special rolls both crudely executed with some kind of sweet sauce.
Either the sushi chief was having an off day or this place is truly over rated. With all the other great places to eat on the outer banks, I felt like I made a mistake.

Not a bad spot, probably the best sushi you will find on the outer banks. Recommended.

My husband and I live up in Corolla on OBX, so even in the winter it takes us about 1 hour to get to Taiko, but it is our «go to» place! This is a family run restaurant, and Tommy, the manager, takes such good care of his staff and cutomers. We always focus on the Sushi and the Udon, and have always left his place extremely happy and satisfied.
Don’t let the tucked away location fool you — it’s a great place to go. Also, if you have any doubts on what to order, speak to the staff about what you typically like, and for the adventurous, Tommy and his team will also whip up sushi that isn’t on the menu if you like!

Came in during regular hours and they wouldn’t serve us. They offered to do to go food but the girl there was so rude we decided against it

um, wow! normally don’t write a review right away but I just had to run to my computer and revel in the most amazing sushi I just had tonight! Its a simple/​basic restaurant but the service and food is fantastic! Really reasonably priced as well.
I highly recommend the Hungry Roll. I normally don’t like cream cheese in my sushi but this roll was an exception. We liked it so much that we ordered a second one after we had already finished. One thing they do to some rolls is that they dip the whole sushi roll in a light batter and flash fry it, then they slice it up. So the sushi pieces are fresh, crispy and warm. It was amazing!!! Every plate that passed by us looked just as delicious.
A bonus comment from hubby: «the bathrooms were spotless!».
We highly recommend the sushi here.
Go! Now!

Rice tasted day old … And was completely devoid of any rice vinegar or other seasoning
Despite the fact that there were at least two experienced, older, sushi chefs… they somehow felt it was appropriate to put Panko in two of the cut rolls and even in a spicy tuna hand roll, which had none of the other usual garnishments. The only positive thing I can say is that they have a fair sake selection and the lime that was in the club soda was fresh.

We ordered a large to-​go order with alcohol and everything was in bag correctly. The staff was friendly. Next time we are in the OBX we will definitely order again. Not sure if we would find in on a weekend evening because the actual restaurant is very small…

Everything about this meal earned 5 stars. We were apprehensive when we first arrived, but after reading the reviews we decided that it was worth a try.
We were greeted and seated immediately. Our server was friendly and attentive. Our meals were served at light speed. The sushi was perfect and the lunch box was delicious.
Our bill was far less than I expected. Hands down best sushi in OBX!

This is a family owned Japanese restaurant with great sushi, habachi and other delicious meals. The place is kind of small but worth the occasional wait. Open all year. The owner /​sushi chef is very friendly and attentive, especially at the sushi bar.
They have beer and wine. In the off season they have good specials too.
Taiko is a great place to eat, and I think you’ll enjoy it. We eat here frequently.

Maybe I am being a little harsh here, since I have only visited it once. Maybe it is a 4 star restaurant in the neighborhood, and I have too high of an expectation. Anyways, I digress.
My friends and I stopped in on Sunday evening after a long day of exploring OBX. I was a bit hesitant since from the outside, the place appeared to be a generic Americanized hibachi restaurant. After reading their «special» menu on the door, I was even more hesitant since there were only hibachi and sushi rolled listed on there. Locating inside a rather rundown strip mall certainly didn’t help. However, since my friends wanted to eat here, I decided to keep my mind open.
As we entered the restaurant, I began to relax. I didn’t think my dinner would be too bad after all. Some might called the décor a bit cliché with Japanese paintings, bamboo blinds and sorts, but I like it. They also had Japanese music playing in the background. As I looked through the menu, I was definitely relived that they had options other than hibachi and sushi rolls.
In additional to hibachi, rolls, they also have udon, katsu bowl, yakisoba, and many other options. I ended up getting unagi bowl, which is eel bowl. It came with miso soup and a side salad. I was very pleased with the soup and salad. I was surprised that the soup came with many pieces of tofu and is not overly salty. The salad was fresh and the dressing wasn’t overly greasy with mayo. I was happy that dinner was off to a great start!
However, my unagi bowl was not as impressive as the soup and salad. The sauce that came with tasted burnt. The rice was not warm too. The rice was a bit hard as if it had sat out for a while. I was very disappointed with it. My friend’s undo bowl with tempura seemed delicious though. The udon bowl was rather generic, but they gave you a decent amount of tempura (two shrimps! maybe ⁴⁄₅ pieces of veggies)! The hibachi my other friend got seemed pretty generic. The portion is quite big, but it’s mostly because they give you a lot of fried rice.
Overall, it was alright. I think if I had gone with the udon bowl, my experience will be 4 star. However, my unagi bowl was just such a let down, I left unsatisfied…