Ye's Sushi

Location: 103 King St West, Kitchener, Ontario

Website: n/a

Specialty: all you can eat "sushi"

Service: craptacular

Food: would you like some rice with that mayonnaise?

Thumbs up?: NOOO.

The location we visited was right in sketchy downtown Kitchener, however there another location near Conestoga Mall in Waterloo. Upon entering the restaurant, it was apparent that we probably weren't going to be getting authentic Japanese cuisine, as all the staff were Chinese and Vietnamese. Given the demographics of the staff, we'll leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions about the service. Despite all of this, we were starving, so we decided to give it a try.

The dinner buffet was about $20.00 per person, and the time limit for eating there was 2 hours. Any leftover pieces of sushi incurs an additional $1.00 charge per piece. We ordered a variety of specialty rolls (which were all just some variation of the typical California roll), as well as some hand rolls. We couldn't tell which rolls were which when they arrived... primarily because all of them were mostly rice and mayonnaise. They were also crammed onto one plate which made handling the sushi a bit difficult.

For the most part the sushi was sub-par. The nori was stuffed with a high percentage of rice, which makes you wonder how much your $20 is being spent on fish. The nori was also tough and chewy which suggests it hadn't been made to order. There isn't much to add regarding the food, just don't expect much in terms of seafood when you order your sushi.

Seating was a bit uncomfortable as with most asian restaurants. The focus of cramming as many people in for maximum profit out weighed offering a relaxing atmostphere/experience.

Rude Native Bistro

Location: 15 King St. South, Waterloo, Ontario

Website: http://www.rudenative.com/

Specialty: fusion

Service: mediocre

Food: cold... when it should have been piping hot

Thumbs up?: nope


We visited this restaurant a few weeks ago, on the advice of a friend. We arrived around 4:30 pm on a nice Saturday afternoon, completely famished because we had skipped lunch. There was a whole one other table of people in the restaurant at this time.

I had the Smoked Chicken and Wild Mushroom Penne ($18.95, for a pasta dish??), which arrived a few minutes before Dan got his Sweet Moroccan Curried Lamb on Couscous ($16.95)... this ticked us off a bit because things should be arriving at the same time! My pasta was cold, so I notified the server and she took it back to the kitchen. What they did to re-heat my food I'll never know, but Dan and I have a pretty solid theory: they dumped the pasta back into boiling water, didn't properly drain it, plated it, and threw sauce back on it. The lack of proper draining made the sauce extremely runny, thus no sauce was sticking to the pasta. CRAP! Keep in mind, there was one whole other table in the place, how is it possible to screw up a dish when it's not even busy??

Dan's curry lamb was decent. The potatoes were a nice touch. Dan loves lamb... baaaaah.

Our server was... serving only about 2 or 3 tables for the time we were there, but she hardly came by. Anyway, Dan totally over-tipped her.

It was overpriced, and in combination with my dissatisfaction with the tepid pasta, we will not be returning to the Rude Native Bistro.

Cameron Seafood Restaurant

Location: 21-19 Cameron Street Kitchener Ontario

Website: http://www.cameronrestaurant.ca/

Speciality: Traditional Chinese

Service: who was my server?

Food: Grease Heaven

Thumbs up?: NO!


I will start the first ever blog with Cameron Seafood restaurant. Cameron is located near downtown Kitchener right in front of Cameron Heights High School. Once located (difficult to find) Cameron appears to be someone's house converted into restaurant. It seems that the restaurant had been quickly converted into a restaurant with little attention to decor and practicality. Nonetheless Bon and myself decided to select from the Dim Sum menu.

First we were served shrimp wrapped in rice paper. This was quite well done though very bland. Also it was very difficult for a non-asian to decide how I should negotiate eating it, so Bon came to my aid and a team effort was required to transfer one shrimp rice roll to my plate. Visually it appeared to be an egg white omelette with 3 shrimp inside the rice paper.

Next came the highly anticipated calamari. What a let down. What arrived looked like a plate stacked roof-high looking like cheesies!! The taste of the calamari was what most enraged me, the texture was rubber and the batter had a very strong egg-y flavour. Not a good start. Next up was something I had never seen in my life... it appeared to be a cabbage roll, but in fact was rice and "BBQ PORK" wrapped in banana leaves. Let me tell you if after reading this review you turn a blind eye to everything I say, remember this DO NOT ORDER this dish. It was in a word REVOLTING. The rice was lukewarm the pork appeared to be 70% fat and as an added bonus, a lovely "hot rod" stick (Chinese sausage) was included in the grease medley. Eww.

Next up was our steamed lotus paste rolls. This was a very pleasant surprise. As a first time Chinese food diner they seemed odd visually, kind of like unbaked dinner rolls. They were nice and goowee, and the lotus paste was sweet yet not too sweet. Bon thinks it could have used more lotus paste. The crystal shrimp dumplings ("har gow") followed and were quite delicious. The shrimp were big and fresh-tasting. I then tried the the standard egg rolls, which in a word... standard.

Next was what balanced the scale in the grease category... BBQ short ribs. My goodness I've had my fair share of greasy, artery-clogging fast food but this sucker takes the cake. The ribs were served in a dish and at the bottom i noticed a half inch pool of grease. Revolting... After losing our appetites we paid our bill and left. It was moderately priced (expensive compared to what you would pay in Toronto), but make no mistake we won't be returning.