Hachi Japanese Sushi and Sake Lounge in Mountain View is truly perplexing. It’s located in a very mini-strip mall on El Camino Real behind a bigger strip mall complex, the café atmosphere is strange with barely lit neon lighting, they play house techno music and have 3 televisions showing A’s or Giant’s baseball games. It’s really more of a casual restaurant rather than a ‘lounge.’
They bill themselves as an Izakaya/Japanese Fusion restaurant offering ‘tapas’ style plates. Although they did have some interesting options, many of the items have flavored aioli or sauce drizzled on top, making the dishes sweeter than we would prefer. They do offer many variations of sushi rolls and nigiri, which are the menu items we focused on for this visit.
Hachi does offer something unique – an interesting and excellent vegetarian entrée option. The dinner plate (accompanied by not so remarkable miso soup) came with a seaweed salad, silken tofu cubes, vegetarian futomaki roll and nigiri:
The veggie nigiri consisted of cucumber, avocado, wasabi sprouts, baby carrot and seaweed sushi:
For non-vegetarians, the Chirashi sushi plate with various pieces of sashimi is one of the better values served in Silicon Valley:
To drink, they offer typical Japanese beers by the bottle, sake, soju and sake/soju based cocktails. We tried the soju-based Mojito which was refreshing with lots of fresh mint.
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