Hanagasa Japanese - Carmel By the Sea

The owner was very friendly and the food came well before it was promised for my To-Go order. Unfortunately, the food itself was decided meh. Many people don't know, but sushi isn't really about the fish. It's the rice. And in Hanagasa's case, the rice was kind of sad. It was not really spiced sushi rice, and it was not properly formed. The hamachi nigiri $12.95 per order. No, seriously) came with huge fish plates that were just fine, and the rice balls came apart when we picked up the nitrile to eat them. The saba tasted more interesting, but the same problem with rice. The caterpillar's roll was completely underwhelming. I paid premiums for so sushi. Nothing tasted *bad*, it was only moderate. Wouldn't leave the distance.

Local Jewel family owned restaurant. Great sushi. Definitely worth a visit!

This place was simply amazing! We love sushi and let me know we fell in love with this place. The beer is super ice cold and the Monterey role is one of the best we ever had. It was the 6 hours drive from Upland to visit Carmel and Monterey. In fact, we will go back for sushi today. We also had salmon and tuna sushi and that was also super fresh. The owner is very friendly. If you talk to him, he'll talk to you. Very nice humble man. If you are and love sushi, try it.

We visited this sushi community on our vacation from Upland CA and love it absolutely. Some of the freshest sushi ever. The owner was very friendly and very humble. Our sushi was so damn good. We're going back today. We made it!!!

Horrible service, stay away. The entire staff is extremely RUDE . We 've lived in Carmel for over 8 years and this is worst experience we have ever had at a restaurant. This place doesn 't represent what Carmel is about. The one thing that Carmel is known for the most is small Mom Pops restaurant and businesses. For the most part Mom Pops businesses are well known for excellent service, politeness, friendly, welcoming behavior but this place does not meet any of the above. The rude behavior starts from the minute you walk in and it continues until you leave. We ordered Hawaiian ahi poke appetizer and it was extremely spicy and it had only very few pieces of ahi tuna, we didn 't touch it and returned it. The madwoman yelled at us as she removed it from our table. Then we can hear her and the chef yelling some more when she brought it back to the kitchen. At this moment we thought about leaving but decided to give it a chance. Wrong decision. The rest of the food was nothing to wright home about. However the bad service and the mean mugging continued on. Finally, we had enough and asked for the check, to our surprise they had added the previously returned appetizer to our bill. When we asked to please remove it, all hell broke loose. The madwoman and the chef (owner/manager) we 're yelling and refused to remove it. After a few minutes of arguing, he finally accepted that his behavior was wrong although not happy, he finally removed it from our bill. But not before expressing his disagreement. He literally threw the recipe and pin at me to sign. Please stay away from this place. Horrible service.