Tanto Japanese San Jose

I would rate the food at this restaurant as 3.5 stars, but I decided to round up to 4 stars due to the delicious barley tea and the welcoming service. The menu offered a nice selection, although I found the food to be just average. I particularly liked the unique baked salmon with cheese in miso, as it was a dish I hadn't seen on a Japanese menu before. I didn't realize that clam ramen was the specialty here, so I will definitely try it next time. The service was exceptional and very accommodating.

I had heard great things about Tanto, so I had high hopes for my meal, hoping it would be as delicious as my experience at Gochi. Unfortunately, the food here fell short of my expectations. We tried the sashimi salad, garlic beef, pork clay pot, and seaweed onigiri, all of which were just average. It seems like we missed out on the popular clam ramen that everyone talks about. Overall, I prefer Gochi over Tanto and would choose to dine there instead.

The food and service at this restaurant were quite good. It is recommended to make a reservation as the restaurant is small and gets busy. The Asari Ramen here is excellent.

Maybe it wasthat we had just left Gochi due to a long wait or maybe we made bad menu choices , but Tanto was not what I had expected and not nearly as good as I had hoped. From the Yelp reviews I had expected small Kyoto style Japanese plates like Gochi or Kappo NamiNami, though probably not as good or as fresh. But what we ordered was hearty, heavy, and not that great. Our waiter, who was reluctant to recommend anything, did recommend that we order more than we had planned. We wanted to know if our first three orders would have been enough food, and he said we should get a couple more. This makes sense at a place like Kappo NamiNami where the plates are much smaller than many people would anticipate, but made no sense given how much food those first three items already were. So a better waiter could have gotten us off to a much better start. We went with less fresh and less traditional options since we didn’t get much guidance from our waiter and felt adventurous, but we probably could have chosen better. We got the Nabeyaki Udon $9.50) which was the best of the four dishes we ate and was very large. It has a tasty broth, typical thick udon noodles, flavorful friend veggies with too soft batter, and fish cake. The pot stickers were fine, but pretty typical. We ordered the crab gratin which was heavy on a creamy cheese sauce which managed to be both smelly and bland at the same time. The flavor was all too earthy and a little like spoiled milk. The tomato dish was more similar than we had expected and had a very tasty tomato broth/sauce with hot boiled tomatoes and cheese. The cheese was again unappealing should have avoided cheese all together with Japanese food – lesson learned), but the tomato part of the dish worked really well and had lots of flavor. Let it cool a little though, since it comes filled with very hot liquid. They were out of the asparagus dish we ordered, which gave us the opportunity to limit our all too large order. The hot sake was not one of the better hot sakes I’ve had, but not bad. And the final price of $48 was less than I expected. I’ll give this place one more try after putting together a game plan on Yelp, but I hope its not like this experience again.

This place serves small Japanese dishes. I thought the food itself was ok, but the service and the variety of food they serve gives this place an extra star. My favorite dish was the wakame salad, which is the seaweed salad. It had lettuce, tomatoes, onions, along with seaweed, in a very light dressing. The service was friendly. We were looking at the drinks and asked about what some of them were, and the waitress gave us a sample to try. I’d like to go again and try the other dishes. They certainly had a lot!