Syun Izakaya - Authentic Japanese Bar

Syun Izakaya is an authentic Japanese bar restaurant.  Every evening after work, you can always see a lot of people dining here to relieve all the stress from the day.  The restaurant is located at the heart of downtown Hillsboro, Oregon.  It is located at the intersection of Lincoln Street and 2nd street. It is just on the opposite corner of Hillsboro City Hall.  There are plenty of free street parkings around the location of the restaurant.  The restaurant also have around 6 tables on the patio and offers patio dining when weather permits. During some evenings, there is also live guitar performance at the restaurant. The restaurant is located on the first floor of a 2 stories building. It may not be easy to spot the restaurant at first, but eventually you will see it.

It has been a while since the last time we were here. It has probably been more than a year.  We got here around 6:30pm and there were already people waiting in line.  The good thing is that it wasn't because there wasn't any table available, it was just that they didn't have time to clean up the tables. Thus we only waited for about 5 minutes to get a table. The bad thing is that I had to wait for 5 minutes just to get the food menu because they were out of menu. We were very surprised that the restaurant does not have enough menu for every table.

We were quite hungry tonight and ordered quite a lot of food. This time we ordered a Tempura Soba, Yaki Onigiri, Salmon Roll and Alaskan Roll.

Both Tempura Soba and Yaki Onigiri came rather fast.  Tempura Soba came with 2 shrimp tempuras and onion tempura. The shrimp tempura is.a good size shrimp, but the onion tempura is average.  The soup base of the tempura soba is quite good. It is a clear fish based soup base.  The noodle itself is Soba instead of Ramen since the item is called Tempura Soba. It felt a bit weird to have Soba in the soup for me. I would rather to eat Soba with dipping soy sauce.

Yaki Onigiri is my favorite part of the dinner. The grilled rice texture is really tasty and smells so good!  I like the taste of hard and crunchy rice ball. After taking a bite at it, there is actually salmon inside Onigiri. That was a nice surprise to us. The dish also came with 2 pieces of reddish, which we really like as well.

Salmon Roll and Alaskan Roll had finally arrived 10 minutes later. We were not tool thrilled when we saw the sushi rolls. Each sushi roll came with 8 pieces, which is fine. However; each piece is cut into different size! Some pieces are small and some are quite large! Besides the size inconsistency, the sushi roll still taste pretty good. We really like Alaskan Roll with Tobiko on top of it. It provides crunchy texture. On the other hand, Salmon Roll is just amazing as we always loved to have salmon in my sushi. We have always preferred to have salmon sushi over tuna.

Overall, the food is great at Syun Izakaya and the price is reasonable. The only downside is the service. The service is a little slow at times even though there are already 4-5 servers in the restaurant.