Koo Japanese Fusion

Still fine for evening sushi delivery. Note: they moved months ago to 215 Thompson and apparently didn’t inform the Internet. They’re also sadly not on Seamless anymore so that sucks. BUT they still had my card info and apparently hadn’t turned into of those local sush/​fusioni-​mills with 200+ perfect — and mostly fake — online reviews. My delivery was quick and the delivery man was, as always, very pleasant.
I’m a sushi fanatic, but not a snob. This sushi was ok (for cheap delivery). Just ok. BUT it was a Monday, so… my bad. I know better. It was fine. Not unfresh, not scarifying. Great ikura and eel as always. Good sized portions of so-​so but eatable salmon and average yellowtail. Try Wed– Sat for best results locally — but only if you can’t get to or afford/​justify Blue Ribbon.

There are two kinds of sushi places. Those that have smooth, round chopsticks. And those that have those those crappy, balsa wood ones that splinter into your lips and taste like sawdust.
Unfortunately, this place is the latter…
Their food is just okay. Their delivery took wayyyy too long (though we had a large 10-​person order).

So this place is ok. I went because it’s right around the corner from my apartment, and I can never pass up two rolls, salad, and soup for $ 8. I had the «passion» roll (yellow tail and avocado) and spicy tuna. The miso soup was only ok, it could’ve used a little more miso flavor but it wasn’t awful. The salad was ok too, only one little tomato but a couple slices of cucumber– at least they tried. The dressing was pretty good, not too runny which I hate. The rolls could’ve used a little more fish. I didn’t feel ripped off but I did feel they were lacking. The rolls were fresh though and the fish tasted good. I’m sure I’ll be back because it’s so close to where I live and the prices are pretty good.

«Koo Sushi is what Denny’s would be if it served sushi.»
The above quote has been repeated and I’m sorry to admit that it’s true.
What is also true is that, I’m lazy and poor and will therefore order again due to the convenience and price. I just can’t resist a $ 10 sushi lunch.

This is a good place for delivery if you live in Battery Park and/​or work in FiDi. They deliver to this area and offer good sushi and very reasonable prices. The lunch specials are great deals and even their regular prices are competitive to those offered in FiDi and Battery Park and they offer better tasting sushi!
What more can you ask for? Good quality and tasting sushi for east village prices that DELIVERS to Battery Park and FiDI, totally awesome find!

Great lunch spot. The portions are good and food is very tasty.
I’ve had everything on the lunch bento box menu. Try the Shrimp Tempura (battered and deep fried to perfection) or the Salmon Teriyaki.
One of the guys from the office turned me to this place a few weeks ago and it’s now the default for somewhere good and quick to take people to lunch.
Shumai is really good as well. I can eat those all afternoon like M&Ms.
At $ 7.95, you can’t beat the prices. If you’re in Copenhagen, you’d have to pay ~$ 40 USD for the same meal! Don’t take this for granted people. Eat at Koo!

In general, I avoid sushi entirely when ordering delivery food. Sushi is at its absolute best the moment it is assembled. And for rolls, the amazing taste of fresh nori will disappear long before it arrives (assuming it was ever fresh to begin with). However, with all of that said, there are times when I want to eat sushi, but I don’t exactly want to traipse around in slush and mount snow banks to get it. Enter Seamless Web.
Koo is the spot where my girlfriend religiously orders her sushi, averaging about 2 orders a week. I deemed it wiser to stick with rolls on this initial foray. I opted for the maki combination entrée ($ 12) which included, in addition to a salad and miso soup, three rolls: tuna, yellowtail, and California. The rolls are a bit on the small side, but they are pretty filling. They definitely pack a lot of fish into them, so there is a good value overall. Nothing spectacular about the taste though. It’s functional sushi on the cheap. Ditto for the miso, though I did appreciate the extra use of enokis in the latter. My standards would be higher if I were dining in, but this was fine for delivery. One can certainly stand to do much worse.

Bad delivery sushi, soggy tempura, and the delivery guy complained, to my face, about my tip ($ 1.50 tip on a $ 10 order). WTF, Koo? The guy tried to tell me that other people were tipping him $ 3 and $ 4. Sorry, buddy, but I’m not tipping you 40 percent…
I can get three rolls from Oyishi for $ 8.99 and they never look down their nose at my tip. Sheesh.

*DEAL ALERT* Great lunch special $ 8 for two rolls, miso and salad. If you want three rolls at another $ 2 bucks.
The sushi is good and the lunch special is such a steal. Almost everyone in my office orders from here. Soooo good! There also on seamless web which is a bonus :)

very tasty sushi rolls at a reasonable price. Decent Seamlessweb find to get your sushi fix with prompt delivery. I had the Alaska roll (salmon, cucumber, avocado) and the Passion roll (yellowtail, cucumber, avocado). Only $ 5 a roll, but you only get six. I like it, I’d order here again. No-​nonsense sushi at a decent price. Just like this no-​nonsense review :)
Oh try their lunch special, you can get two maki rolls for $ 8 plus a salad and soup! Not a bad deal and just enough food to make you full.

No stars.
It wasn’t so bad that my friend found a hair in her salad. Right? It happens.
A Cockroach fell out of the ceiling above us and landed RIGHT into my water, where it began to swim around.
Of course this happens AFTER we finish eating.
I am thoroughly disgusted. The waitress was not at all fazed by this, she simply picked up the cup and carried it to the back. Barely apologetic.
… no stars.

All you need to know about this place is that a COCKROACH fell from the sky (aka their ceiling light) and landed into my friend’s water glass.
Never again will I eat here or order from this place.
COCKROACHES falling from their ceiling? And the waitress wasn’t even phased! Apparently it happens often according to her reaction.
I looked at their health code violations:
Sanitary Violations:
1.) Food service operation occurring in room used as living or sleeping quarters.
2.) Facility not vermin proof. Harborage or conditions conducive to vermin exist.
3.) Sanitized equipment or utensil, including in-​use food dispensing utensil, improperly used or stored.
4.) Evidence of mice or live mice present in facility’s food and/​or non-​food areas.
This place should be shut down. DISGUSTING.

This is the most disgusting panang curry I’ve ever had in my life. Why is it watery? Why does it not have coconut milk?
DO NOT ORDER THAI FOOD FROM A JAPANESE RESTAURANT. Seriously, the vegetables and the chicken have absolutely no flavor at all. I feel like they just rinsed this in water and served it lukewarm.
BEWARE OF THIS PLACE.
I’m usually quite generous with my ratings, but this is truly truly bad.

When I finally get around to creating a Best Cheap Eats list, Koo will definitely have a spot on it. When we went there around 10pm last night, the place was empty. Really empty. I pushed the door open anyway to see if I could rob the joint, but the maitress finally came out and sat us at the bar.
It turned out to be a surprisingly nice place. I guess with no one else to serve, we got the royal treatment. I had a miso soup (with little strings of mushroom), shrimp shumai, a spicy tuna roll and an Alaskan roll. For under $ 15, it was a good value for the food.

When you’re too lazy to get up off your butt and actually go to a Japanese restaurant, Koo will do. And you won’t pay a fortune, either.
Super fast delivery via Seamless Web. Huge portion of shrimp and vegetable fried rice that was tasty and hot. I will easily have leftovers for tomorrow — yay! Could have shared with a friend. Love that it comes with miso soup, too — great value for money.
I also ordered a green salad and a single order of mackerel sashimi. The mackerel was good, very fresh and still cold. I only wish there had been another slice or two — only two small slices for $ 2. Boo. The green salad was nothing special, but it was fairly big, and all the veggies in it (lettuce, grape tomatoes, cucumber, shredded carrot) were fresh and crisp. The salad dressing was flavorful.
All in all, I’m a fan so far. Basically, I’m a fan of value for money, so that will pretty much mean I’m a return customer.

Based on delivery:
My $ 20 dinner, comprised of 2 sushi rolls and an app of japanese spring rolls, looked pretty paltry when I took it out of the bag. «That’s IT»?, I heard myself saying.
The rolls were just small — small amount of innards, small amount of rice. Usually I have a hard time putting a whole piece of a sushi roll in my mouth; not so with Koo’s rolls. I also ordered one piece of sushi ala carte. I thought sushi a la carte were typically two to an order — I got only one piece of salmon sushi for my $ 3, and it wasn’t even correct — I had ordered salmon roe, not salmon. (I even checked my seamless web order online to make sure, and confirmed that it was their mistake).
The Japanese spring roll ($ 4 for 3 to an order) was fine (nice crispy outside) but nothing to write home about (somewhat bland inside, and a pretty flavorless syrupy dipping sauce).
They threw in napkins and utensils even though I requested via seamlessweb not to have them included.
Meh.

Sushi delivery never seems like a good idea. Raw fish thrown in a box and carried about the streets of New York. When it arrives you don’t know where it came from you only know that it was cheap (scary) and faster than if you’d ordered it at the restaurant (disturbing).
After reading the rave reviews I decided to give Koo a try as a last minute dinner fix. The bento box seemed to be the big winner and I could deal with $ 15 since I planned to share it and wasn’t super hungry. It does seem like the price has gone up from $ 11 of some reviewers to the current $ 15. My friend was wary that it was enough food but since I was paying, I was calling the shots.
15 minutes later I was handed a massive brown paper bag the size of a Whole Foods shopper. In it was a massive bento box, a separate soup, a salad, and plenty o’rice. See my photo… it was insane. The sashimi was very fresh and they included good stuff: fatty tuna, salmon, and hamachi. California roll was typical but the chicken teriyaki was gross. Flavorless and tasted like it had been cooked in a microwave. That sweet onion teriyaki stuff at Subway (yeah the one that comes in little cardboard boxes) tastes better than this stuff. The miso soup was good and I love the little mushroom shoots they threw into it and I didn’t have much of the salad but it was pretty normal.
Overall it was enough for two people. I’d probably stick with sushi/​sashimi options though since they didn’t seem to have a mastery of even the simplest chicken teriyaki. I’d order again when I’m REALLY craving Japanese but I’d just as soon walk around the block to Marumi and have my mind blown.

The $ 10 for three rolls special is a really good deal. I tried the spicy California roll (which everyone was raving about), and it was pretty good. It actually looked nothing like a California roll, so not sure why it’s even called that. I also got the Boston roll (which looks exactly like a California roll) and the Mexican roll. They were all pretty good, and great for the price.
The service was curt and professional. As I was finishing my glass of water, someone came by to refill it (which I really appreciate). They also had Japanese cartoons playing on their TV, which was sort of random.

Fusion is right. I saw Crispy Duck and Thai food on the menu as well. It barely escaped my $ 3/​pc (minimum) unagi test so I tried their raw stuff as well. It took them 45min for delivery downtown via
Ordered:
–Special Combination Box ($ 15.95) [with Salmon Teriyaki, Beef Negimaki, Brown Rice, California Roll], fresh veggies (sliced bell pepper, zucchini) was the first thing I noticed, brown rice a little watery for my taste, cali roll had sesame seeds outside it, very good, salmon teriyaki was skinless, thicker than most, beef negimake was just OK, everything was drizzled in a mystery corn starchy sauce
–Spicy California Roll ($ 5) — everyone here raves about this so I had to get it, too bad no one talks about what’s in it so I’ll spill the beans, it’s simply tempura flakes comingled w/​fake crab meat. No avocado, tempura flakes were a bit soggy upon arrival but still tasty regardless
Maki Roll
Total came out to $ 12.50/pp after everything

(Quote 1:) «Koo Sushi is what Denny’s would be if it served sushi.»
This is the quote from a Time Out New York review that Koo VOLUNTARILY put on the front of their delivery menu. I’m not squeamish, but the thought of eating sushi from Denny’s does not appeal to me.
I was so baffled that I had to look up this review. Surprisingly, TONY also referred to Koo as:
(Quote 2:) «good, inexpensive sushi,» and even said that their
(Quote 3:) «sushi and sashimi is as tasty as any you’ll find in this price bracket.»
So it’s not as if TONY had given Koo a terrible review, and Koo was too stupid to realize they were being criticized (which was my initial thought). The owners actually decided that this was the best way to market themselves to the masses. And perhaps it is. In Kentucky.
Choosing Quote 1 over Quotes 2 & 3 in this situation is very troubling to me. What if the proprietors of Koo head to the fish market and are faced with a similar decision, say, between:
(Fish 1:) fresh, expensive, high quality tuna;
(Fish 2:) very decent, modestly priced tuna; and
(Fish 3:) cheap, stinking, rancid «tuna» that a sushi joint in Wyoming wouldn’t even grind up and throw into a spicy tuna roll.
Do you trust them to make the right decision, given their track record? If that is a slogan that they CHOOSE to use, is that the kind of judgment you trust? Do you want these people serving you raw fish? I say no.
I’ve ordered from Koo twice. The first time they chose Fish 2; but sure enough, the second time they chose Fish 3. Danger might be my middle name,* but these are not the sort of risks I like to take.
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*It’s not.