Restaurant Review: January 2024 – Toukei

We recently dined at a fabulous restaurant in Houston, Texas called Toukei. It’s located at 9630 Clarewood Dr in Houston, TX. Let’s get to our review!

The Good

The food is fabulous although there aren’t many vegetarian options on the menu if you’re looking for a vegan or vegetarian restaurant. Almost all dishes have some type of meat infusion or cooked with animal fats and oils.

Prices for the dishes are reasonable considering the inflationary escalation most restaurants have had since COVID pandemic. We include our receipt below to give you a sample of the money spent. We had a group of 6 so we ordered quite a bit of food and shared amongst the group.

The Bad

We made a conscious effort to arrive here early at 5:45 p.m. to ensure we got seated. This restaurant gets extremely busy and most of the restaurants in this area of Houston (Chinatown) get really busy on the weekend. While we had no problem getting a table at 5:45 p.m. when we left at 8:30 p.m. there were several groups waiting in line to find a table. The restaurant itself is not very large and there are no reservations, it’s first come first server and the restaurant won’t seat incomplete groups.

The wait staff were fine when we started our evening with frequent visits from our waitress but as the night carried out, we saw less and less of our waitress

The Ugly

The ugliest thing about this restaurant is that it is trying to pretend to be a nightclub. The music in the restaurant was playing so loud our group could barely hear each other talk. We were so concerned that I whipped out an app on my smart phone to check the decibel rating of all the noise. The joke for the evening was wondering if Toukei was a restaurant trying to be a nightclub or a nightclub trying to be a restaurant. The food is good but we don’t want to go deaf enjoying it.

We asked the waitress if the music could be turned down and she immediately said, “No!” She then explained that the music comes from a computer in the owner’s office and only the owner had access to it. We asked if she could call the owner to turn it down and she immediately snapped, “No!”

It was obvious to us that other customers had complained about the music because she immediately had responses prepared with an emphatic no each time. Why does it matter? From The National Council on Aging:

• Sounds below 70 decibels are safe, while sounds above 70 decibels are harmful.
• Prolonged exposure to sounds louder than 85 decibels can damage your hearing.
• Sixty decibels is equal to the sound of normal conversation, 90 decibels is closer to a lawn mower or hair dryer, and 120 decibels is more like a siren on an emergency vehicle.
• Exposure to sounds at 120 decibels may cause discomfort, and 140 decibels is considered the threshold of pain.

Conclusion

It’s a great restaurant with good food but the loud music and the risk of incurring hearing loss isn’t worth it so we doubt we’ll return to this restaurant anytime soon considering there are hundreds more restaurants in the area that aren’t pretending to be a nightclub.