Originally Posted by kebosabi

A great way to tell real Japanese food apart from the usual mass-market Japanese restaurant is to look at the wasabi you're served. If it's the one that they serve out of a tube (sadly, 100% of every Japanese restaurants in the US uses this plain straight-out-of-a-tube wasabi) that's an immediate hint that the place is just a plain mass-market Japanese restaurant. If it's real wasabi, you're given your own wasabi root and you're supposed to grate your own.