Restaurant Review

 Hello everyone. I'm going to share the experience I had with my friend at a restaurant called “Sonaya” in Shibuya. 

This place is 8 minutes away on foot from the Shibuya station and there are many other restaurants around there. We found this place on Instagram and apparently it was famous for its gyoza.

We made our reservation about a week before we visited this place. As you can see from the first photo, it was crowded with a lot of people and there were already people with reservations in line before we got there. 

One of the unique features of this place is the menu. Some people call it a sutra, but it was indeed quite difficult to read what was written. Actually, we had pretty much fun deciphering this.

We just ordered 3 things since we were only allowed to order the food once in the beginning, and we didn't want to waste food. I'm sure they have to run it like this because the restaurant's space is very small and they are always busy. 

This is the yaki-gyoza, the most famous dish in this restaurant. They only gave us the dipping sauce on one small plate, so if you want one for each person, I think you should ask the waiter. The gyoza was glutinous and sweet, even without the sauce. The dipping soy sauce was a little bit spicy, which enhanced the sweetness of the gyoza. 

This is also one of their popular dishes, which is called cream cheese Ooba-maki. The cream cheese is rapped in Ooba leaves and fried like Tempura. Personally, this was my favourite dish of the day and even though it's fried, I felt the oiliness wasn't too much which made me want to eat more.

The last dish is Yodare-dori, which is a chicken salad with spicy soy sauce dressing. They gave us the salad and the dressing separately and we decided to pour the dressing over the chicken. I couldn't figure out what the black pieces were, but I found the dressing very tasty.

There were a couple of things I didn't quite enjoy about this restaurant. One was that the space is very small and there was just enough room for one person to walk between each table. The other was that our table was closest to the bathroom, so whenever someone opens the door, it was smelly. Lastly, I wish we could order food freely, and it would have been much better if there were more variety in non-alcohol drinks. Overall, I would love to visit this place again and try other kinds of gyoza.

Sonaya

Food　★★★★☆

Price　★★★☆☆

Atmosphere　★★☆☆☆

Accessibility　★★★★☆

Overall　★★★★☆