Our Saturday lunch pick this week was at the University City Pasta House which I have mentioned a few times before, so instead I will give a review of a former neighbor to someplace I was much more interested in that is also in U City -- the Tokyo Seafood Buffet. I had received flyers for this new "conveyor belt sushi" place on Olive which definitely had me curious, but the poor to mediocre reviews online had always scared me too much to go there. Luckily we recently had dinner with our very anonymous former neighbor (as has been quoted before in my St. Louis Buffet list and in her review of Jilly's) and she had quite an opinion of the Tokyo where she recently dined.
Now that it has been open for several months, my former neighbors visited and they were extremely disappointed in their offerings. They are not big fans of national chains like Applebee's or Olive Garden and usually like the more local, "mom and pop" type places. However, they reported the Tokyo was already dingy and not very appealing and they did not really like any of the food there. They said it was huge, but being large does not make it good! The "conveyor belt" sushi did not appeal to them at all and like many reviews they mentioned how it all looked like the same stuff going around and around.
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| Conveyor belt photo borrowed from stltoday.com review |
The Tokyo Seafood Buffet is an enigma: the ambiance if non-existent but the food is exceptional. We were en route to the Sheldon Concert Hall after work last night (Thursday, April 11, 2013) and when I saw the message “conveyor belt sushi” I had to stop. My wife, usually very skeptical about such spontaneous events, reluctantly decided to humor me – at least to take a look. We were astonished at the size of the place: it is designed for hundreds (dozens?) of dinner guests and it was immediately obvious that this was not your standard intimate Japanese setting. They have numerous restaurant booths, rows of tables that seat 8, and several other seating choices. Even with the decorative lanterns, wall hangings and dozens of ornate Geisha dolls, the ambiance avoids the warmth of much smaller Asian restaurants in the area.
ReplyDeleteIt was a little off-putting that there were very few customers but when we looked at what they were eating we had no problem deciding to eat there. Several groups of young folks were cooking at their table: the food items were plentiful and looked to be of astonishingly high quality! I was not comfortable with the make-your-own style (maybe next time) so we looked at the other possibilities. In addition to the sushi bar, surrounded by the notorious conveyor belt (with excellent homemade wasabi!), there are long tables with complex pre-made buffet offerings. We started the meal with oysters and “peel and eat” shrimp and put together a small “American” salad. I can’t eat soup anymore because I need to avoid the high salt but I did choose several types of sushi and was very pleasantly surprised at the excellent quality. My wife thought that her sweet-and sour soup was too hot. There were several tempura offerings but for our main dish, we chose “build your own” fresh items that were essentially stir fried for you on a Hibachi grill. The sauce choices were limited but very tasty – I had Mongolian hot sauce and my wife had garlic sauce. The ingredient items were fresh, numerous and seemed to be very good quality: the resulting cooked mixtures were excellent. After that we “foraged” through the pre-cooked item tables and the items were so numerous I can’t even begin to describe them. I chose small tastes of BBQ ribs, sea bass, various dumplings, etc. I had to try the chicken feet (not bad) but stayed away from the hundred year eggs (???). Every choice we made was tasty with only one “clinker” – the salmon was over-seasoned. The dessert buffet was simple – I chose assorted fresh fruit (kiwi, oranges, strawberries, etc.) and everything was at its prime - but there were ice cream confections and various other dessert selections.
The service was “buffet style,” as expected– our server seated us, brought drinks, and cleared – so I don’t know if the waitress was sweet or surly. This would not be a place to impress that special client or for an intimate dinner to start a romantic evening. But if you’re hungry for some good Japanese style cooking and want a wide variety at an astonishingly low cost, this is the place for you.