Yin and yang. Surrealism and geometry. Dark wood and cool white stone. Circles and squares. Kenobi’s design is beautifully crafted, a graceful balance between elements and textures. There’s military might in the enormous statues of samurai guarding the bar; organic lamps survey the dining room like an intelligent species of cipollina onion. It is also grandiose—cathedral ceilings and high-backed horseshoe booths—which impressively accentuates the lack of patrons. Because while balance is what elegant (if ridiculously oversized) Kenobi is all about in concept, the food performs about as well as a drunk moose on roller skates.

You might think the menu descriptions sound intriguing, but they have all the accuracy of a match.com profile. “Shaved ribeye wrapped over avocado and Japanese yams grilled with teriyaki glaze” amounts to dry, chewy Steak-Umm-like strips wrapped around a mealy yam or mute avocado, then doused in syrup. We’ve had scallops in a “Japanese five-spice” that turned out to be a total misrepresentation, unless the five spices were sugar, salt, syrup, hoisin, and that orange “duck sauce” you get with Chinese takeout. Some menu descriptions have induced a degree of alarm, like “soy fluid gel” and “taro-goat cheese velvet.” All the foams and hyphens in the world can’t save miso-marinated salmon from its prosaic and overly sweetened destiny.

Nigiri is better, and includes such guilty pleasures as chu-toro and o-toro, but fish tends to be cut too thick, producing inconsistent bites; some pieces of fattier fish, like salmon, have no marbling at all, while some are pure butter. Nigiri rice is underseasoned and pointless, the fish on top tasting vaguely of Freon. Of course, you’re encouraged to hide the fish in a bevy of asinine, overpriced rolls like “Watch Your Butt,” in which cream cheese and jalapeño supposedly warrant an $11 fee, or a $14 “Seven And A Half,” about whose fans we can make obvious Freudian assumptions.

If you go, stick to drinks. Make no mistake: our wine rating refers mostly to the rice wine selection here; the grape wines are abysmal. There are many more nuanced and compelling sake choices than there are among the one-dimensional, overbearing wines offered here. Then again, the latter might be the best balance with Kenobi’s food, in which you’d have to be Jacques Cousteau to find any seafood underneath all that gel fluid.