Ma-ma… Makino-Chaya

Well… it’s not poison.

Went to Makino-Chaya for lunch today.  They used to be on King Street, but now they are in Aloha Tower Marketplace.  Gone is the “tabe-houdai table service” – it’s just a regular buffet now.  There were some downtown office people and local buffet-hounds, but a lot of the clientele were the bus-in fresh arrivals from Japan who were a captive audience at ATM before the buses returned to take them to their hotels at check-in time.

There was a mix of really good and really nasty stuff on the buffet line.  At first I was stoked that there was sushi, but after closer examination, I was not impressed.  The nigiri wasn’t very good, with pedestrian varieties like maguro, ika, ebi, tamago, and unagi.  There was something unidentifiable that looked like tiny shako covered with spicy-tuna sauce.  There were some maki-mono, but what I had was below average.  There were tiny little “donburi” which were tantamount to a biteful.  Those had been sitting out unrefrigerated, so looked a little on the dried-out side.  The sushi was below what I have come to expect from one of those local Korean-run fast-food sushi places.

There was dessicated king crab, and a fair selection of cooked seafood which was pretty good.  The fried-stufff area had  some decent tempura and some good ika-geso.  The platters needed drain racks to keep the bottom layer of food from sitting in a sea of coagulating oil.  

The best thing was wa-gyu teppanyaki.  Freshly-cooked marbled steak “imported directly from Japan”.  That was the highlight – I went back twice (as in went once, then went BACK twice).  Shiawase…

Since the dessert table and the salad table were generally weak, there was no reason to visit them.  There was, however a crepe station!  The emotionless woman there quickly turned out a beautiful thin crepe, then proceeded to unceremoniously glop on processed strawberries and blueberries, ice cream, and whipped topping, then fold it with random abandon, rendering something akin to an exploded quesadilla.  The processed fruits were bad and sour.  I was disappointed.  Oh, and the service table had only chopsticks, steak knives, and plastic crab-splitters.  No forks.  No spoons.  Nothing to eat your mangled-looking crepe with.  Great.

I suggest going straight for the steak and maybe trying a banana crepe (don’t forget to bring your own utensils).  Not as good as Shogun, or The Willows, or even most hotel buffets – except for that steak – but I’m not convinced that it was worth the price of admission…

$15 P/P lunch buffet from 11:00-14:00.