I’m always looking for new sushi places to go to so I was excited when I came across Fuji Yumi, situated in the heart of the Cape Town’s CBD and quickly invited my friends for a night out. I looked at their website beforehand and it looked great. So I phoned and made a booking.

When we arrived I was surprised by the lack of signage outside and the fact that the sign on the door said ‘closed’ when it was definitely open. We were led to our table and I realised I needn’t have booked, as the place was almost empty.

The guy who served us didn’t seem to know much about the menu. We asked him if they did salmon roses, to which he went to ask the chef. When he returned he asked for our order and I asked about the salmon roses again. Seems he had forgotten to ask, so he went back and then returned to say they didn’t. Quite strange seeing as though they served the rice, the salmon and the Japanese mayo that makes up a salmon rose, yet couldn’t put one together. My friend asked the guy which was the best hot food on the menu and he replied ‘this is the hot food’, pointing to the menu. So not very helpful.

Anyway so we ordered our food and after a shaky start we weren’t too excited about it. In fact, I was a bit worried. But the sushi wasn’t bad. It was quite nice in fact, but not amazing. It was very badly put together though and pretty much crumbled as soon as you tried to pick it up. The selection is not great either. However, as I said, the sushi that they did have was quite nice. Overall, we weren’t overly impressed but it was okay. My one friend, the only one that ordered hot food, had a different experience. He ordered the beef noodles which came in a dipping soup with udon noodles and he absolutely loved it. I had a sneaky try and it was amazing. If I ever have occasion to come back to this place then I will definitely go for that.

Overall the place wasn’t amazing. There was absolutely no atmosphere, just a TV showing some sort of sports game on and the service was not the best. If they could work on this then I would return, but definitely to have the beef noodles… that was a winner.