Zen Sushi & Bar

For sure the worst sushi I have ever had and honestly I don’t know sushi that well or have high standards. The flavor is not there the service is terrible the rice was undercooked and it was just overall a bad experience. I have had it delivered a couple times with Viking food just out of convenience and regret it every time.
That sushi craving can be strong sometimes but don’t come here!

I’ve never ate here, it’s the best spot to grab a drink before a movie. They also have the most comfortable bar stools in all of Bellingham!

The restaurant’s atmosphere is some of the best in Bellingham. However, the food is slightly under average and the establishment suffers from some of the worst service. The waitresses ignore the customers. I do not recommened this restaurant based on the bad attitudes of the workers

I wish we were able to give no stars in a review but one star will do I guess. This place is the worst. First off, they don’t change their sani buckets after the health department code of 4 hours. Yes, all the tables you’re sitting at are being wiped off with the same sanitizer bucket that was made that morning. With the same towel. Oh, and I’m still laughing at this one. I received a jasmine tea and when I checked the inside of my teapot the waitress never realized that it hadn’t been properly washed before and there were old tea leaves with mold ALL OVER THEM. I was so unbelievably disgusted that their employees are so negligent in cleaning. What’s even funnier is that they never run the soy sauce containers through the dishwasher. They wipe the outside of them, that’s it.
I feel like it’s so hard to list off every single detail of zen sushi because there’s so many. Do not promote this place and eat there. To top off the disgusting habits with cleanliness, their owner Ken was seen walking by a leaf on the floor, looking at it, walking around the entire conveyor belt, and THEN telling a server in the middle of serving her table that she needs to pick it up. I am so OVER this place. Don’t pretend to be Buddhist and flaunt your religion if you can’t practice its doctrines.
Also note that your server tips out 7% of their total food sales to the kitchen and has to pay if he/​she makes $ 0 on a $ 100 tab. Yes, $ 7 of his/​her own money has to be paid because the owner is a cheap, egotistical control freak. Get it together KEN and learn how to run a restaurant and take care of your employees/​customers. Maybe you’d get better reviews and not have to turn over your team of servers so quickly!

I liked that there is plenty of seating for the conveyer belt. The variety on the belt is good. They have cucumber salad, seaweed salad, calamari salad, spring rolls, potstickers and sushi going around the belt. Not to mention sake bombs. You could see the chefs cutting the fish. The rolls themselves were o.k., definitely for the price. I would eat here again.

Sat at the bar for a quick beer before the matinée star wars. They have some sapping soap opera on the TV at the bar couldn’t believe it. The exiting bar tender was basically forcing the small party to close out because her shift was ending. I guess so is their afternoon get together. Im wondering where her laundry basket and ironing board are hiding. I cant see them? Sorry to bother you miss bartender.

My first visit to this place was far from a Zen experience. Pretty sure two of the servers were either competing for tables, or they were stressed out about something else. As far as belt sushi places go, we don’t have many options in Bellingham. My last visit was satisfactory, but they were out of jasmine tea, which seemed odd. Either way, this is a good place to get a quick bite from the belt before catching a flick next door.

The food is decent, the Double Pepper Roll
Is my favorite. They seem to have a large turnover in staff and the service is often lacking. The last time I dined at the sushi bar I had to hear the two chefs talking down about other staff and past customers. Definitely didn’t impress me.

I honestly am struggling to find good things to say about this place.
Here are the positives…
On a very cold night the bar was warm.
Being right next to the theater helps.
The house sake isn’t horrible (although not great either).
… I guess that’s about it.
The negatives…
Everything is overpriced for what you get. The rolls are tiny (4 pieces, and the fish was so small you could barely taste it), the Nigiri was obviously frozen, not fresh, all the sake was way overpriced, the layout of the place is horrible with only one person able to walk through some parts of the restaurant, combined with the fact that the wait staff isn’t trained to wait for customers to go first makes for an awkward place to walk around. Lastly, I couldn’t even see the urinal or myself in the mirror in the bathroom. And what is with the stupid weird disco lights trying to make the place unique?
Overall the only thing that saved the place was the nice (but strange) wait staff that provided some amount of entertainment.
I hate to give bad reviews but I don’t recommend this place at all.
It’s about as good as grocery store sushi in a (very) slightly better environment. Sad for what could be a great place.

I don’t have any huge complaints and I don’t mean this review to put them down. They’re just average quality with a higher price then I would have expected.
The place itself is really nice looking and located next to the new theater which is convenient when you want to grab a bite with some friends after a movie but the sushi, or at least the sushi on the belt isn’t anything special.
They have some nice outdoor seating and a pretty full bar but again the prices are so high that I don’t feel the location offsets them.
Overall the place is fine but there is definitely better sushi in Bellingham.

Sushi looked old and tasted warm and fell apart very quickly. Some of the food wasn’t covered up and we watched it pass a dozen or more times.
Bar was good and great place to grab a drink before the movie

This conveyor belt sushi place is pretty typical, with a bar against one end and booths nestled up against a double row of conveyor belts.
The sushi is ok, with the print so tiny on the identification menu that you kind of just pick something that looks good and hope for the best.
It may just have been a bad night when we went (it was a Saturday), but we ordered something off the menu about halfway through our meal and it took nearly forty minutes to arrive.
For nearly $ 100 with tip for 4 people (including a small child), I think we will go somewhere else next time.

I visited Zen Sushi for lunch with some coworkers. We each had 4 plates of sushi, which at first might sound like a lot, but that is about the equivalent of 1 and a half to 2 regular sized sushi rolls at the non-​conveyor type sushi restaurants.
As far as conveyor belt sushi goes, this sushi is about average. Very similar to the other conveyor belt sushi in town (Kuru Kuru), in fact if you were to just watch the conveyor belt, at least 80% of what you see would be identical between the two conveyor belt sushi restaurants.
They do have a menu that you can order other items however I only had food off the conveyor belt. If I return I will have to try some of their «off the menu» food to see if it is better.
The giant Buddha is really cool, and certainly adds to the atmosphere.
One thing that was really odd was the tea. With three of us having lunch on a cold and windy day we all ordered tea. Most places would have given us a tea pot with 3 cups, however at Zen they gave us 3 tea pots and 3 cups, we each had a charge of $ 3.50 on our separate checks for tea, which was a surprise. This style seems very wasteful of tea pots, and of our lunch budget. If you are ordering tea you might want to ask how much it costs, and how many tea pots you are getting.

Whoa! What does one want when selecting sushi? Freshness!!! Combine a conveyer belt snaking the length of a football field filled with a small selection of items so that a duplicate plate passes by every 20 seconds and maybe five customers. Inevitably, the items look sad. I felt like Goldilocks with too hot, too cold, too soggy, too dry, and too lukewarm… never a «just right!» The prices are very reasonable. The owner has made a success of Thai restaurants in Bellingham so he has some skill and he appears to be generally a nice guy. When I come in I find the host to be friendly and energetic. There is a fairly high turnover of students so in the handful of times I’ve been in I’ve probably been served by a newbie over half the time. Since the place is dead when i hit it before or after a matinée, the poor fresh faced host is usually engaged with settings prep or non work-​related activities. As soon as i step up to the register the employee jumps to and knocks service out of the park. I usually order a couple of hand rolls and uni to go. It is made fresh and the integrity of the hamachi itself is acceptable. My M.O. is to request seaweed salad and water with ice to tide me over while I wait. Every time it has been delivered lickety split. The wait for my to go order is a respectable few minutes. Granted, the place is relatively empty so one would expect good service. The sushi chefs usually smile affably and acknowledge me as they make my order. So if one enters to get a to-​go order to sneak into the theatre next door or to satisfy the need for a quick sushi fix and order for preparation on the fly this place does the deed well. Pulling from the conveyor belt is not so great. Plenty of quality napkins, good ginger, sinus clearing wasabi, soy and chopsticks have always been included in my to go bag. My experience has only been during the day and clientele traffic has been very slow. That suits me fine when I’m ordering to go. Apparently, Fellow Unilocalers stepping into a bustling Zen sushi partake of a totally different experience which has its own rewards and foibles.
The vibe is definitely hip… feng shui… modern… and clean since is almost new. Love the giant Buddha. Décor is less is more. The bar, which is in a separate section, is inviting me to give a Friday happy hour a try… with the hope that it is hopping. The layout and décor are well thought out. I like the modern uncluttered approach and find the use of black and gray hues soothing.

First time here. Great location, seated next to the movie theatre. Great atmosphere and music. The sushi options were ok. The sushi on the belt didn’t taste so fresh, but it was to be expected. Menu is color coded for price which was reasonable. The plates came with 4 pcs. Prices ranged from $ 1.75 to $ 4.50. The quality wasn’t too great. But the concept was good. Unimpressed. Unfortunately won’t be dining here again.

I’ve been here a couple of times now. They definitely seem to be trying very hard to create a good sushi product, and it seems they’ve lowered their prices a bit since my first visit. The service was still a little spotty, but was redeemed by a free piece of cheesecake for my bday.

The restaurant was clean and the waitress was really helpful. I was overwhelmed by the plate system on the conveyor belt, but to each his own. Some sushi was really good and some was lack luster. I recommend ordering something special off the menu because it will cost the same as picking up a plate. The only difference is that you have it wait (sometimes a while) rather than instant gratification. It’s a good place to go with someone you already know, but I found it really overwhelming for meeting up with people I wanted to chat with. Maybe it’s not good for the easily distracte… hey did you see that green plate? it looks so good! Should I get it? Yeah? oh no, now it’s too far away. Now I can’t focus on this conversation until I see it again and grab it…

If you’re grabbing drinks before catching a movie at the only commercial theater in Bellingham, this is the only bar you can go to. So Zen has a huge monopoly, but it turns out I’m pretty okay with that.
This place kind of makes me laugh because the décor and ambiance are very Las Vegas and therefore very NOT Bellingham. On a 50 degree February afternoon they seriously had the wall-​length doors in the bar wide open to create a lounge. This was totally just for effect too, because the bartender was wearing a North Face. My mom and I shivered at the bar deciding if we really wanted to order a drink. In comes the bartender, who tells us we can order at the bar and sit inside the restaurant, where it is actually warm.
Their drink menu is huge and very reasonably priced. My mom and I each got giant Hurricanes for $ 8 that came in tiki mugs with umbrellas and the works. They also have happy hour every day, if you can time your movie right. Staff are friendly and having watched the sushi chef put some stuff out, their food looks pretty darn good.
So thanks, bougie sushi restaurant, for the awesome drinks.

We came to Zen Sushi on Saturday night after a late afternoon movie next door. It’s a busy day of the week so we didn’t mind waiting. The waiting area was full so we waited right outside the door, just feet from the front desk. Bad idea. They never called our name, only after practically every waiting party was seated did we go inside and find that we had clearly been skipped over. What’s the point of taking a list if you don’t make a half-​hearted attempt to find the folks who are waiting.
The hostess realized she’d skipped us and asked if we had been on the list and then got us seated quickly, seats on a part of the restaurant they clearly were not expecting to use. We had no utensils and no soy sauce trays. I asked a chef in front of us for them, he told a server. Still none came. So I turned around and faced the front desk (the wait staff were busy doing other things) and the owner asked if we needed something. I told him, it took another few minutes to get. Too long, particularly after waiting nearly 30 minutes to get a seat.
The food was fine, the place was busy so there were a lot of fresh dishes coming out. There were also a lot of hot dishes, too. Little egg rolls and pot stickers were a nice addition.
After a rocky start, we finished our meals with smiles on our faces. The food was good and our water glasses were kept full. We don’t usually order off the menu here, though we do on occasion order specific nigiri if we don’t see it on the conveyor.
We keep coming back, but it has been over 6 months since our last visit. It might be even longer this time before we return.

Like everyone else, I really WANTED Zen to be fabulous. We went for a snack after the movie — got there at 10 (they close at 11 on Sundays). Hardly anything on the belt, but they were happy to make us whatever we wanted, and it was $ 1 off for happy hour.
We had the spicy tuna roll (mushy), salmon skin roll (okay), spicy tempura roll (meh), himachi nigiri (very thin slices and weird color), and ungainly nigiri (too much teriyaki). The rolls are only four small pieces, not six chunks like at Wasabee.
Service was very good, though. No complaints in that regard.
Even if I go to the movies, I will head over to Wasabee — better quality and better prices! Sorry, Zen.