Zensho Japanese Buffet

The mention of Zensho on my prior post...made me think of...well...ZENSHO!
A very good and quite long standing Japanese resto along Tomas Morato. They have nice teppanyaki tables here where you can eat as you watch your food being prepared. They also have EAT ALL YOU CAN BUFFET!!! TO ORDER....not buffet style...which we like better =)

Php 485.00 for lunch...Php 585.00 for dinner. A pretty good deal for Japanese food lovers like us. So what it worth it? Let's see...

You are given this check list of items included on the buffet.

You just put the number of orders of each dish on the list, classified into sashimis, sushis, makis, teppanyakis, robatayaki, yakiniku and furais.

Our picks:

Mixed Sashimi Plates

Salmon, Tuna, Lapu-lapu and Kani sashimis. our first sashimi plate had pretty raggedry cut up pieces...but the next plates looked better. Just because we caould have all we could eat doesn;t mean they could just dish up un-carefully prepared sashimis....we want quality with the massive volume we wanted to consume you know ;P

Salmon Sashimi

This was a special request...the waiter let us have a serving of pure Salmon sashimi...but one of the buffet rule was sashimis are served mixed.

Beef Yakiniku

The serving was kinda small...and the beef pieces kinda fatty...nevertheless...edible =)

Fish Teppanyaki

Again a small serving of fish teppan..with garlic...a bit cooked to oily.

Beef Tenderloin Teppanyaki

The tenderloin pieces were bigger..yet fatty too.

Baked Oysters

Perhaps not a good choice. They didn't taste anything like oysters.

Ebi Tempura

Nice and served with Kakaiage. I ate this myself...except for the Kakaiage which he could have =)

Oyster Teppanyaki

Kinda seemd to have stewed in it's juice as opposed to being stir fried.

Lamb Robatayaki

The lamb pieces were kinda tough.

Mixed Seafood Fried Rice

I think the teppanyaki guy forgot to shower it with salt =)

Kimchi Fried Rice

Just like japanese fried rice that had some sour spoonfulls when you get the kimchi bits =)

Chicken Yakitori

Nice and sweet chicken thigh meat pieces.

Squid and Asparagus Teppanyaki

The Asparagus were "stalky" the squid was ok.

Now what have we learned from this exercise? Well, the quality of the food was greatly dimished with the trade-off for volume. I have dined here ala carte and it was a good dining experience. Value for the buck...well, you want to fill up on Jap food...this is a pretty good deal....but for us...we would rather pay a bit more for less quantity than paying a bit less for more food but losing the taste and quality. The food we love like sashimis should be prepared with care...properly served and most of all freshness assured...so I guess with what we had here...the dining "pleasure" was a bit lost...though I must admit...it was FUN ticking off all the food on the menu and having the food parade in (though the food came in a slow rate) as we eat our way to satiety.