General Notes
The food at Cha Ya is terrible. It's an interesting concept -- vegan Japanese cuisine. Unfortunately, every single dish that I had here was so bland. The only real source of seasoning / taste of any kind came through the sauce ... but every sauce was so disgusting and left an unpleasant, acrid/bitter aftertaste. Without that the only component of any dish that I looked forward to was the tempura batter. Most dishes were cooked to an appropriate level (neither overcooked nor undercooked), but the complete and utter lack of flavor made it difficult to stomach. Which is a shame, because vegan food does have a lot of potential; it's restaurants like this which fuel the derision people have for vegan food.
Negatives
> The sauces for each dish were served separately in the takeout container, which normally is great ... except when I had three different sauce containers and had no idea which one was supposed to go with which.
> They only accept venmo and cash
> No dine-in right now; only take-out
Dishes Tasted
- ☆☆☆☆ Tonchi Nasu -- Eggplant stuffed with Satsuma potato, corn, hijiki, carrots, and soybeans. Lightly battered and deep-fried, tempura style. Served with a special ginger sauce. Really bland, structural integrity is questionable, and the sauce is acrid.
- ☆☆☆☆ Vegetable Tempura Roll -- A large roll filled with tempura of banana squash, carrots, yam, and green beans. This is the most bizarre tempura roll -- all the vegetables are mushed together and fried as one composite piece. Extremely bland and has terrible structural integrity
- ★☆☆☆ Cha-Ya Nabe -- Napa cabbage, spinach, red onion, carrots, mushrooms, kabocha, broccoli, cauliflower, lotus roots zucchini, snap peas, snow peas, silver noodles, tofu sukiyaki broth. The vegetables themselves were alright (overcooked, though that's my fault for ordering soup for takeout). The broth was acrid and had a very unpleasant, somewhat bitter aftertaste.
- ★☆☆☆ Agedashi Tofu -- deep fried tofu in special sauce, garnished with grated daikon and ginger, kaiware, scallions, and shredded nori. The texture was meh; the exterior was neither chewy nor crisp. No clue if I was using the correct sauce, but the dish overall was quite bland.