08/22/09

Favorite Restaurant

by shanzy288

I love this place. It's become one of my favorites. Rock Sugar looks like it belongs in a Vegas hotel. The food is amazing. Great appetizers too! They also have a great drink menu. You seriously have to try this place. Great for dates or just a bunch of friends.

• Pros: great ambiance, yummy food
• Cons: nada

07/08/09

A HOLE IN THE WALL part 1

by Amerc

Most of us know of a restaurant where the food they serve is just delicious but the place is just so-so, we often refer to them as “ a hole in the wall”. ROCKSUGAR is just the complete opposite….after visiting the place last weekend, this place is a “BIG EMPTY” hole in the wall, nothing much to offer in terms of food. RockSugar’s décor and ambiance is well done, very impressive, but management forgot to put the same attention to their cuisine.

Me and my husband with another couple decided to try the place since we were at Century City last Saturday. We provided ourselves enough time, about 2 ½ hours to have dinner before going to the cinema for the 9:15 pm screening. The menu is well written, lots of choices with very interesting details, one can’t help salivating as you make your pick. I ordered the black cod. My husband who is not a big fish lover ordered the noodles with chicken; our friends both ordered the salmon dinner entrees. As we were ordering the waiter told us that entrées are normally shared…family style? Maybe the servings are big to be shared? We also ordered some fried rice to go with our entrees to complete our meals. My girlfriend wanted some wine to go with the food, but the waiter said they were out of Pinot….it was early in the evening on a Saturday night…..unbelievable????

Our waiter came back to double check that he has the right orders from each of us…good, he is checking …but a few minutes later, he brought a bowl of fish soup that nobody remembered ordering….waiter claims that he wants us to try the soup but will not be charged for it….nice gesture …but really…the waiter must have made a mistake , we never thought this was a pre-cursor of other mistakes coming? Our orders came within some reasonable waiting time…but not the fried rice. Also, it became apparent that the waiter’s suggestion to share the entrees must have been a joke …the food on the entrée plate is barely the size for an appetizer, where is the rest of the black cod? I saw more tofu than fish. Salmon pieces were definitely not big enough to share…no way!

We kept waiting for the fried rice to come….our entrees are cold by now…the waiter never came back to our table to see if all is OK…actually the water boys or the waiter-runners were around us…with a standard response when we asked about the rice….”I just checked on your order, it’s on its way out”. At this point all four of us have decided to just try our entrées without the rice….how can a pan asian restaurant make people wait for their rice? If they even know anything about asian food, rice is a basic part of the meals. How can a pan asian kitchen not have rice in their kichen? I don’t understand why it takes so long to bring the rice to our table. At the end of our meals, one of us finally made eye contact with our waiter to tell him to cancel the order for rice….for which we received an insincere apology…”I’m so sorry about that!” Really now….

• Pros:  nice restaurant decor
• Cons: pricey and tasteless cuisine

05/15/09

Fun Place, Not so good food

by Yale09

Great service and a fun place to eat. The food is maybe a 5 on a 10 scale. Mediocre is a generous description.

• Pros: Service and decor
• Cons: Food is mediocre at best

05/06/09

Great atmosphere & good food!

by Peanut

Really cool place with good Asian fusion. It's a bit pricey, and the portions are small, so it's not an everyday hangout place.

• Pros: Great layout of the restaurant; good food
• Cons: Expensive

05/03/09

Never again!

by clarkswanson

The waitress first greeted my girlfriend and I for lunch espousing about the orgin of the restaurant and the fact that the owner/founder was the famous "whatever his name was". He was the owner of the successful Rock Sugar in the valley somewhere she says, then gloats about this guy for another couple minutes.

Restaurant Owner Tip #1: nobody cares about your fame in the valley with one restaurant we admittedly never heard of, or had been to.

She then says, everything is ala carte, and recommends the "trust me" entree. This is prepared by the chef and just "trust" that it's devine... about the same level of trust I have in this owner being famous, so we said pass on the "trust me".

Restaurant Owner Tip #2:

All the left over fish which was uneaten or over-ordered can't be wrapped up in a "trust me" lunch box and passed off as your high margin plate under a clever marketing name; people simply aren't that naive, they'll eat what they want, and judging by the reviews, empirically correct on the subject.

Restaurant Owner Tip #3:

Don't be so cheap that you try to disguise the fact that you don't want to print menus by having patrons have to crank their heads 180 degrees to see the LCD tv printed items which are hard to read from across the room... a likely plot to get them to go with "ah, just trust me" menu.

The waitress then takes our order, which included Edamame and some sushi. Rice is separate, as is everything else and never came in a timely fashion. The edamame arrives, a cost of $2.50, and without exaggeration, there are about 10 edamame in a small bowl, or translated roughly 13 cents per bean!! This is traditional horse feed, and very cheap. Why not offer a decent size portion, unless you don't want to show in contrast how small the other portions are?

Overall experience was aweful, combined with the dim witted waitress who simply couldn't be insulted no matter how hard I tried.

Not recommended. Try Katsuya in Brentwood or Hollywood for good atmosphere and food, or Hana Sushi on Wilshire close to Barrington, or for quick sushi take out style, Sushi Sho on Montana and 11th in Santa Monica.

• Pros: none
• Cons: many

04/12/09

Can we get our rice please!!!

by Aprilkj17

Sisters took me to this place for my B-Day..They sat us down right away on the beautiful Heated Terrace near the waterfall...We order everything from our appetizers to our main Dish with RICE...in less than five minutes they bring us one of the dishes without the rice....No Big Deal...We figured that they had given us someone else's Dish because we hadn't received our appetizers first and because the lady looked CONFUSED when she brought it to our table.... Which turned out to be true (the table next to us ordered the same thing) We finally get our appetizers...We eat that...Taste was Great! We ordered a Dish that only goes well with rice. My sister ordered Glazed Shrimp and I ordered Salmon. Nothing comes on the side with the order so we obviously wanted our RICE to eat with it...We waited about 5 minutes...The waitresses move so fast that we couldn't even stop anyone to ask for the rest of our food so we can eat. Finally our waitress stops by and ask how is everything...We tell her we are still waiting for the rice so we can eat...Her response..."Well everything comes out separately and we're very busy because we have a party ...but I'll check on it..." Another 5 minutes pass...We start to nibble on our food so we can at least eat some of it while it's still HOT..She comes back with "I yelled at the chef to hurry with the rice." Some other lady comes out and explains to us again for some reason that they don’t bring everything out at one time...I’m thinking to myself I can’t eat my fish and then eat my rice last. I want it together. Tried giving them chance...I guess we looked so unhappy that the BusBoy of all people came to assist us...He gave us better service than our own waitress...He went to the back to find out what was going on...he could only do so much...Just the fact that the guy that cleans the table and take the dishes away was helping us. To make a long story shorter...Our waitress comes back saying that her manager was going to come to speak to us along with our rice that we had waited now 20 minutes for which is still going to be out in another "2 minutes we promise" (By this time our food was cold)... At that point we just asked for the check and said forget the rice...Manager comes with our check...She was nice enough subtract our appetizer's. She took our food to box it up...We get to front to pick up our food and some guy that worked there asked us how were things here and we shook our heads and said “Not Good”..He never bothered to ask why; he just kept smiling. I guess he thought we were joking. So on our way to the car I checked the bag to make sure we had two boxes which we did.... We get to our car and I decided to check the food and noticed they finally gave us our rice...so I'm thinking well that means they forgot to box one of our plates. I checked the other box and to OUR Surprise they boxed my food and my sister's food together...Her Glazed Shrimp and my Salmon were having a party in the same box...I was HIGHLY upset; However I kept my composure. What were we supposed to do feed each other out of the same box. I was sure it was purposely done...I grabbed that bag went back up there and spoke to the general manager...She was not at all apologetic...I just told her nicely to take the food back becasue we barely touched it anyway and just refund our money..She did give us a refund for everything. Again, did not apologize for the poor services... Maybe they were just having one of those bad nights......First time eating there...Bad Impression

• Pros: Beautiful Restaurant (5 stars for the look)
• Cons: The Service...Horrible ( Half star for the Service)

04/07/09

It's a trap!!!

by XfooYen

Sunday lunch. Restaurant was virtually empty (that should've been a sign). Wife and I shared three apps and ONE entree. We had one (small) glass of sake each, no dessert. Bill was nearly $90. Too pricey for lunch on a Sunday (at a mall, no less). Service was good and informed but the food was mediocre at best.

• Pros: beautiful decor
• Cons: overpriced and gimmicky

04/01/09

Example: great place for good bread

by BobbySocialVibe

A GROUP(6) OF US ATE HERE A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO AND LOVED IT. FROM THE APPETIZERS TO THE MAIN MEALS EVERYTHING WAS GREAT. WE ATE FAMILY STYLE AND SHARE 4 OR 5 APPETIZERS AND THEN SHARED 5 MAIN COURSES AND RICE. EVERYTHING WAS GONE! LOVED IT ALL. THE FRIED WHOLE FISH WAS REALLY THE BIG SUCCESS. THE WAIT STAFF WAS ATTENTIVE WITHOUT BEING BOTHERSOME. JOEL OUR WAITER WAS GREAT AND HAD A GREAT BACK UP TEAM OF ASST. WAITERS. THIS PLACE WAS SO GOOD WERE ALREADY HAVE RESERVATIONS AGAIN.

• Pros: Example: best croissants in town
• Cons: What are the drawbacks?

02/22/09

Great food and Great service

by LARachelLA

Rock Sugar reminds me a lot of Tao in Las Vegas, a lot of thought was put into the atmosphere and the architecture really gives the restaurant a cool feeling.

The food was awesome, we ordered the Princess Shrimp, the Beef and the Sugar Snow Peas, every dish was fantastic and came with a healthy portion. I also ordered the Orange Mojito which was great but not cheap.

Everything was great but not inexpensive, it was about $100 for the two of us but we also got drinks and dessert, you could definitely eat there for less $. I would recommend Rock Sugar to all my friends and I can't wait to go back.

• Pros: Atmosphere, Food, They take reservations, and parking is free for 2 hours.
• Cons: Drinks can add up if you order a few.

02/14/09

Rock Sugar aka Home of the Terrifying Seabass

by fluxequalsrad

1st off the decor: I found the whole Liberace does the cavernous far east thing a little bit jarring - it's kind of like eating in an airplane hanger spray painted gold. Still I?m ready to let ambiance go in a restaurant if the food is killer, though unfortunately at RS this is not the case. Conceptually RS?s cuisine is intended to be "pan-asian excluding China and Japan". Inexplicable Sino-Japanese grudge notwithstanding, the phonebook of a menu is comprehensive, but that variety is moot, for the dishes one orders bears little to no resemblance to the food actually served. You see, as the plates arrive, one can?t help but notice their remarkable similarity - specifically, mound after mound of greasy meat and sliced onion, all slathered in the same ubiquitous mystery sauce. Variety?s understudy is a noxious potpourri of odd garnishes and dips - i.e. the ?yogurt sauce? suspiciously resembling bad sour cream. Unfortunately, the food?s doneness doesn?t share such a consistency, and ranged from scorched to raw.

There was one unique dish to speak of - the seabass the waitress recommended. Whole fish can be wonderful or they can be potentially terrifying. Well, even the odious precedent set by the earlier monotony couldn?t have prepared us for what was to come. A bog-like odor would herald its arrival: the fish was batter fried, with eyes exploded and mouth agape, before being crazily arranged on the plate, as if by a deranged taxidermist, in a manner meant to resemble it still happily swimming - only now bearing random Zorro-like slashes and a the cavernous gash down the back containing an ugly eruption of unidentified stuffing/sauce. I don?t know what this fish did to deserve such a demise (perhaps it audaciously enjoyed Chinese/Japanese food?), but it was hands down the worst dish I?ve ever been served in a restaurant. I could continue for pages if not for the wordcount, but I think my point is clear. If you at all enjoy good food, AVOID ROCKSUGAR!

• Pros: Large enough to land a helicopter in.
• Cons: Food seemingly cooked by vandals.