Tanto has a wide variety of dishes and is not your usual type of Japnese restaurant. Food was pretty good, but I really need to go back and try even more. Service was okay and you probably need to make reservations on Fridays or on the weekend. A more unique thing is they let you keep any leftover booze at the restaurant for 3 months.

The food and service was pretty good. Go with a reservation because it’s a busy and small restaurant. The Asari Ramen is pretty darn good here.

I have been here about five times and the food has never disappointed me. Line ups can be very long for lunch or dinner but if you plan ahead with reservations, it usually isn’t a problem.

The lunch menu and the dinner menu are very different. The trick is to ask for the dinner menu at lunch so that you can try everything, but beware, it’s cash only during lunch hours.

Maybe it wasthat we had just left Gochi due to a long wait or maybe we made bad menu choices , but Tanto was not what I had expected and not nearly as good as I had hoped.

From the Yelp reviews I had expected small Kyoto style Japanese plates like Gochi or Kappo NamiNami, though probably not as good or as fresh. But what we ordered was hearty, heavy, and not that great.

Our waiter, who was reluctant to recommend anything, did recommend that we order more than we had planned. We wanted to know if our first three orders would have been enough food, and he said we should get a couple more. This makes sense at a place like Kappo NamiNami where the plates are much smaller than many people would anticipate, but made no sense given how much food those first three items already were. So a better waiter could have gotten us off to a much better start.

We went with less fresh and less traditional options since we didn’t get much guidance from our waiter and felt adventurous, but we probably could have chosen better. We got the Nabeyaki Udon ($9.50) which was the best of the four dishes we ate and was very large. It has a tasty broth, typical thick udon noodles, flavorful friend veggies with too soft batter, and fish cake. The pot stickers were fine, but pretty typical. We ordered the crab gratin which was heavy on a creamy cheese sauce which managed to be both smelly and bland at the same time. The flavor was all too earthy and a little like spoiled milk. The tomato dish was more similar than we had expected and had a very tasty tomato broth/sauce with hot boiled tomatoes and cheese. The cheese was again unappealing (should have avoided cheese all together with Japanese food – lesson learned), but the tomato part of the dish worked really well and had lots of flavor. Let it cool a little though, since it comes filled with very hot liquid. They were out of the asparagus dish we ordered, which gave us the opportunity to limit our all too large order.

The hot sake was not one of the better hot sakes I’ve had, but not bad. And the final price of $48 was less than I expected.

I’ll give this place one more try after putting together a game plan on Yelp, but I hope its not like this experience again."

I would give the food here 3.5 stars, but I rounded up to 4 stars because of the good barley tea and the friendly service.

The menu had a good variety, but I thought the food was only average/good. I enjoyed the baked salmon with cheese in miso, since it’s not something I usually see on a Japanese menu. I didn’t know clam ramen was the specialty dish here. I’ll give that dish a try next time.

Service was excellent and accomodating.

After hearing good things about Tanto, I came here expecting a meal on par with my very delicious dinner at Gochi.
Maybe we ordered the wrong items or came here on an off night, but I didn’t think the food here was that great.
We ordered the sashimi salad, garlic beef, pork clay pot, and seaweed onigiri. All of those dishes were merely average. Note that we didn’t get the clam ramen, which is what many people seem to rave about. I’d much rather go to Gochi than come back here.

This place serves small Japanese dishes. I thought the food itself was ok, but the service and the variety of food they serve gives this place an extra star.

My favorite dish was the wakame salad, which is the seaweed salad. It had lettuce, tomatoes, onions, along with seaweed, in a very light dressing.

The service was friendly. We were looking at the drinks and asked about what some of them were, and the waitress gave us a sample to try.

I’d like to go again and try the other dishes. They certainly had a lot!