Of these groups, Yamato (probably named after the ill-fated battleship) is in the Benihana/sushi vein.  Portsmouth Ohio isn’t know for the quality of its Asian restaurants, with most are basic and forgettable Chinese buffets.  While it’s good that the area has gained more options in the past decade, with sushi and hibachi being added, these are typically generic in nature.  It’s unfortunate that the OH Food Guy places Yamato in that crowd.  But there is both good and not so good here in our estimation; in fact, even if Yamato isn’t the best, it is still very good to have viable sushi and hibachi options in the area.  

Yamato has a well designed and determined menu with many, but not too many options.  The sushi list is actually rather complete and even offers mackerel sashimi (an OH Food Guy favorite as well as a good way to evaluate quality), which is not always available outside of major city sushi restaurants.   The menu includes a good list of appetizers, entrees (mostly Chinese style), hibachi dinners, and two pages of sushi options.  The lunch menu provides a good variety and better prices over dinner, and lunch prices are even offered on Saturday, which is a good treat.  The décor is good, but the floors were visibly not clean when we arrived and we showed up shortly after they opened and were the only customers there.  

We ordered a sampling across the menu:  sushi and sashimi lunch, mackerel sashimi, black pepper chicken (assumed on ordering to be Chinese style), and yakisoba (fried noodles) chicken.  The quality control is decent, but could be improved from our estimation.  The timing of food was good, clear soup and salad came out with our meals, but given a party of four they only brought 2 bowls of each.  While it’s clearly tied to the number of dinners ordered, it would be more efficient and effectively to bring multiple serving bowls for all. 

The salad was decent, but contained sufficiently superfluous water which watered down the salad dressing.  The salad dressing was good, a relatively typical Japanese sesame style which is not common outside of Asian restaurants.  The clear soup had a decent broth, but the mushrooms could be softer it seemed like they were just cut up and thrown in but not cooked.  

The sushi and black bean chicken came out next.  The sushi was relatively good and typical with a mixture of tuna, salmon, imitation crab and more.  The variety and plating were good, but it seemed rather sparse on a big plate.  The texture and temperature of the sushi was all good on the sushi and sashimi lunch.  The California roll that came with the lunch was very good. The extra sashimi order of two mackerel was different though, it was much colder than the rest of the sushi, it appeared to have been recently unfrozen and plated.  It would have been good for the sashimi to have come with sushi rice as well, but that is generally hit or miss outside of more traditional Japanese restaurants in big cities.  

The black bean chicken was much more Chinese buffet style.  It was a crispy chicken which was covered in a heavy sweet sauce.  Despite being “black bean” it was more “sweet and sour” and not spicy at all as “black bean” usually means a spicy black bean sauce.  The fried rice that came with the black bean chicken was, to us, more basic and appeared less of a fried rice and more of a prepared rice mean, such as a Rice-A-Roni.  Overall, this was edible, but not something we would order again.  

The yakisoba was a good dish, it was a stir fried noodle dish with chicken and vegetables.  Overall, most of the vegetables were cooked properly and this was a mostly proper teppanyaki style dish.  The plating was basic, it could have been seasoned more with salt, but the OH Food Guy’s wife (OH Food Girl?) thought it was good.  Overall, this was the best dish we had; which is good since we would order it again, but it’s also disappointing since this is a sushi/teppanyaki restaurant.   Service was also good, with the server not hovering, but attentive.