Restaurant review: Cafe Juanita

So today was my wife's birthday. I took her out to an Italian restaurant in Kirkland called Cafe Juanita. The place looks like they turned an old rambler house into a restaurant. The inside looks pretty up scale, but is also a bit cozy. They gave us some different types of breads and fancy crackers. We also ordered some grilled octopus dish as an appetizer, which was pretty good, but not great. For the main course, I had a Oregon Wagyu New York strip steak. Oregon Wagyu beef is an American breed Kobe style beef. Airi had some daily fish dish. My steak was pretty good. The quality of the beef was definitely good, but the preparation wasn't anything I couldn't do at home. Airi says her fish was good (it was an entire fish prepared whole), but the particularly type of fish wasn't to my liking. Overall, the place was ok. The food was decent, but not worth the price. The atmosphere was somewhat arrogant and I'm of the opinion that the chefs just tried too hard to create complex flavors where some simpler flavors would have worked. The main draw of the restaurant is that they use organic and renewable ingredients. However, they favored items like rabbits, foi gras, etc... For Italian food, we would prefer to go to Grazie which is much cheaper. For the price range of Cafe Juanita, we would prefer to go to Daniel's Broiler. We will probably not be going back.