Waka Sakura

Virtually every new restaurant opens with at least a little obvious fragility – an uneasy optimism that naturally follows any investment of half a million dollars (or multiples thereof) to build, permit, staff, stock, advertise, and actually deliver a new dining experience, especially given the realities of consumer expectations and aggressive competition. With razor-thin margins, restaurants depend on volume for profitability, so most are desperate to fill their tables, and especially in early days, rely on great service to turn guests into repeat customers.

Waka Sakura doesn’t fit this mold. Opened in late July 2025 as the second SoCal location of a conveyor belt sushi concept attached to Japanese supermarket Tokyo Central, this Irvine restaurant lacks neither for confidence nor guests. It spent its first weekend keeping potential customers at bay, maintaining a tablet-based wait list as thousands of increasingly hungry people waited in line to explore the market. Rather than offering reservations, Waka told even its grand opening guests to expect two-hour wait times despite a virtually empty dining room. During our first attempt to visit, only a quarter of the tables were filled, and on our second visit, Waka kept more people waiting even with most of its tables empty. This is apparently the way Waka’s Gardena location works as well, indicating that its parent company is neither desperate nor particularly concerned about making great first impressions with its guests.

Once you’re seated, the service model differs significantly from nearby conveyor belt favorites Kura Sushi and Kaisen Kaiten Sushi Bar, where guests can peruse and pluck multiple plates from an ever-moving conveyor without ever placing an order. At Waka, there’s no parade of pre-set plates: You use a table-mounted tablet to order everything from drinks to savory plates and desserts, then receive individually made food items from one of two (upper/lower) conveyor belts, with soups, drinks, and desserts arriving by hand. Pickled ginger, soy sauce, and toothpicks are on the table when you arrive; as with Kura, servers bring small soy sauce dishes and small packets of authentic grated wasabi shortly thereafter.

The same servers frequently come and clear plates, which means any hope one might have of avoiding tips due to impersonal conveyors (Kaisen) or service robots (Kura) will dashed. You’ll also typically pay more per dish at Waka than those places, such that a per-person charge of $60 before tax and tip wouldn’t be unusual – our first meal was $88 per person before tip, $103 afterwards. In other words, though this is a conveyor belt restaurant in concept, the pricing is more like a traditional sushi restaurant, even if the execution is somewhere in the middle.

There’s one culinary oddity to note up front: Waka Sakura advertises its rice as Hitomebore from Miyagi, Japan, and the ordering tablets’ screen savers show pictures of the rice with bright white grains. But all of our sushi (and that served at Waka’s original Gardena location) looked almost brown – likely the product of a darker vinegar. It doesn’t negatively impact flavor, which is lightly sweet and not particularly sour, but is worth understanding given that online reports have suggested that the restaurant serves “brown rice.” While that’s technically true, it’s not the sort of brown rice you might be imagining.