Bento Cafe is a new hip and trendy sushi restaurant located in the Plaza Building in Downtown Orlando. The concept was originally developed in Gainesville where it’s been successful enough to expand to a second restaurant there and open one here in Orlando. The atmosphere inside is, as mentioned above, hip and trendy. Visiting their website, shown below will give you an idea of the look and fell, as well as the music that plays. I for one am not a fan of techno and house music with a lot of bass while I eat, but hey, some people may be! The restaurant was pretty much empty, which I will address more below. Its location is not the best as it’s hidden underneath the building. If you don’t know about it, you won’t find it.

Upon entering instead of being seated, you grab two double-sided menus, order and then seat yourself. As frequent sushi diners know, this can become a problem. The menu (sample below) is so large and overwhelming that it’ll take you about 10 minutes to look through everything and decide what you want. It’s much easier to sit and decide. The menu offers a large range of selections from bento box rice bowls, noodle soups, noodle bowls, sashimi bowls, salad bowls, and two pages of sushi rolls. On top of this they have another menu for their specialty drinks called Boba Teas which come in various flavors with additional add-ons.

Our order included the following: 2 Beers ($3.75), Cold Sake ($8), Edamame ($3.95), Szechuan Chicken with Veggies Noodle Bowl ($6.95) & Chicken Katsu Udon Soup ($6.95). The edamame came out and the first thing I noticed was there was no salt on them. This was unusual as they always come with salt. Each one I ate was dry. I just didn’t like them. It took about 15 minutes for our main courses to arrive so we sat and enjoyed our beers and sake and pushed the edamame aside. So to readdress my empty restaurant comment above, my guest and I couldn’t help but notice each time we looked up (we were sitting along the back wall facing the sushi bar) the two  sushi chefs behind the bar were constantly staring at us. It made for a slightly uncomfortable meal and we eventually just had to ignore it.

Our main dishes arrived and they were both good. Both came in large bowls with very large portions. The Noodle Bowl was spicy, just what you’d expect from a Szechuan dish. Although the chicken was overcooked, I was able to overlook it since the noodles were so good and tasty. The Udon Soup was pretty good. Lots of udon noodles with sliced breaded chicken on top which was soaking in the soup. This of course made the chicken nice and juicy which was a great compliment with the udon noodle.

Overall the meal was decent. I would give it another shot but next time, try their sushi and rice bowls. The prices for everything on the menu are excellent for the amount of food you get. Two people could have a good meal for around $25 including drinks.

I’ll have to post their hours of operation when I locate them.

http://www.bentocafesushi.com