Yoshi's

510 Embarcadero West (Oakland)
(510) 238-9200

Japanese in Jack London Square

So this was my second time coming here and seeing The Bad Plus, but this time we wanted to take advantage of preferential seating at the show and decided to eat here. I ordered the Niman Ranch beef tri tip with some kind of mushroom sauce which sounded mediocre and tasted mediocre... go figure. A few others in our party ordered grilled salmon and sushi rolls: the fish was thankfully fresh, but the flavors were typical.

The service was terrible: our waitress forgot one of our orders, got one of them wrong, and consistently tried to hustle us into buying more food, which really made us all uncomfortable. I really don't want to talk about the restaurant anymore because it's making me kinda mad when I think about how we spent $400+ on food which was small and overpriced, so on to the show...

The jazz club is really the only reason to come here and if you like expensive, but good cocktails you'll probably find good reason to get hammered like my friends did! The venue is intimate, the lights are dark, the acoustics are good, but the problem with the performance this time was that it was unusually short: a 35 minute set for a band with 7 or 8 minute songs was disappointing. Maybe they were jet lagged or maybe it was because they've been playing 2 shows a night for four days... I don't really know, but the performance was just like the food.

So yeah, overall, I think none of us really had a good time. The only reason I would ever come back here is if an artist I REALLY wanted to see was playing here and they didn't have any other shows at any other venue.