Maru Plus Japanese Restaurant

Really wanted to love this place, since the decor is so fun and it’s a very relaxed vibe. Unfortunately, nearly every item we ordered was very underwhelming. The miso was so so thick, not like a regular miso soup, but like concentrate that hadn’t been diluted properly, and it was so salty and opaque and gloopy that we only ate a spoonful each. It didn’t settle and need stirred the way that miso made with real miso paste does, but was thick and cloudy no matter how long it sat. I think my disappointment about the miso set us up for disappointment with the textures and flavors of the rest of the food. We ordered the tuna mayo onigiri and the huge onigiri (I forgot what it’s called). The tuna onigiri had very little filling and both the filling and the rice was super dry. It just tasted like bland canned tuna and rice. The monster onigiri was better in that it had a lot of filling, although I wasn’t blown away by it. Definitely the better of the two onigiri tho. The char siu bowl was definitely the best item we ate all night, if a little rice heavy. The flavor and texture of the meat was great! On the other hand, the sushi was really disappointing. They didn’t have small dishes for soy sauce, so we ended up using the little plastic takeaway containers to pour the soy sauce in. Another table had taken the soy sauce bottle, so we used the gluten free soy sauce first. I have literally never tasted soy sauce that tasted the way that one did, I don’t know what was up with it. We eventually asked the other table if we could steal the regular soy sauce bottle, and that one was definitely more normal tasting, but still didn’t taste like regular soy sauce? It was truly an unexplainable flavor. The special nigiri sushi set was okay for the most part, except for the scallop which was rubbery and really tasted bad. Overall, I wish we had gotten other dishes that might have been better. I’ve seen good reviews for the ramen and wish we’d ordered that instead of the sushi set.

Sushi restaurant offering gluten free and vegan options.