Volume 2, Issue 15 July 6 - July 19, 2000

Walking into Domo is like stepping into an ancient Japanese Dojo. Rustic furniture stone tabletops and artifacts abound. Outside there's a beautiful and serene Japanese garden, and an active Akido Dojo framed by a Tea Ceremony War Memorial. But kids, that's where the fun ends...

There have been numerous rave reviews written about this place by respected maga-zines and papers in Denver. I submit that none of these publications or these writers can ever be trusted with pen, paper, or fork under any circumstances without the super-vision of a tattooed adult. To put it another way: Domo sucks.

Every meal came with a platter of side dish-es. I opted for the seafood/vegetarian plate. Everything they brought out was nearly inedible and mostly unidentified ... alas, there was no seafood to be seen. In its stead I found pork and beef, possibly from a Japanese pig or cow fish that I'm not aware of. One of the platters we were subjected to carried the distinct odor of something that had already been eaten once.

The Reishi Gandema Mushroom Tea sup-posedly had some sort of healing properties, but all it truly offered was a place to hide my nose from the smell of the side dishes. Two of my friends ordered Iced Green Tea and were only given one tiny pot to share. After asking several times for more tea, they gave up and split it. They also had to valiantly guard their tea from the water girl, who was adamant about filling their tea glasses with water.

For the main course, I tried the hamachi with a marinade of wasabi tobiko and avo-cado. Basically, it's a bowl of rice with a few strips of fish and some over-cooked mystery vegetables. Friends, I've had better hamachi at the Sushi Shack in the L.A. airport.

We were rudely told that dessert is not served at Domo, which is too bad, because for the first time during one of these reviews, I was still really hungry.

It was hot and muggy enough in the dining room to expect rain, but everywhere else in the building was cool. As if waiting in a hot, half-empty restaurant for an idle waiter to notice us wasn't enough, we were dealt with by three different waiters, none of which communicated with the others. The last of the three, a polite and soft-spoken man, attempted to explain what we were eating and make it seem edible, but he was never seen again.

The few other diners there were fairly yup-perific: cell phones here cell phones there, ring a ding, blah blah blah ... accented by a screaming child whose parents tittered in delight at how articulate the little yupplet was. My suggestion is that every tattooed freak get the tattooed posse together, go down there, and drink all the hoo haa yada yada saki you can until Domo gets the idea that our money is as green as their tea.

My tattoo grade is a homemade scratch job that just won't heal, and my wrestling grade is a debilitating injury in front of an empty arena. Oh, and just in case any of Domo's Akido guys get wind of this review, the picture at the top of this column is not actually me ... nor is that my actual name ... in fact, I'm not even actually a real person. F