Well… it’s not poison.<\/p>\n
Went to Makino-Chaya for lunch today. \u00c2\u00a0They used to be on King Street, but now they are in Aloha Tower\u00c2\u00a0Marketplace.\u00c2\u00a0 Gone is the “tabe-houdai table service”\u00c2\u00a0– it’s just a regular buffet now.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
There was a mix of really good and really nasty stuff on the buffet line.\u00c2\u00a0 At first I was stoked that there was sushi, but after closer examination, I was not impressed.\u00c2\u00a0 The nigiri wasn’t very good, with pedestrian varieties like maguro<\/em>, ika<\/em>, ebi<\/em>, tamago<\/em>, and unagi<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 There was something unidentifiable that looked like tiny shako<\/em> covered with spicy-tuna sauce.\u00c2\u00a0 There were some maki-mono<\/em>, but what\u00c2\u00a0I had was below average.\u00c2\u00a0 There were tiny little “donburi” which were tantamount to a biteful.\u00c2\u00a0 Those had been sitting out unrefrigerated, so looked a little on the dried-out side.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The sushi was below what I have come to expect from one of those local Korean-run fast-food sushi places.<\/p>\n There was dessicated king crab, and a fair selection of cooked seafood which was pretty good.\u00c2\u00a0 The fried-stufff area had\u00c2\u00a0 some decent tempura<\/em> and some good ika-geso<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 The\u00c2\u00a0platters needed drain racks to keep the bottom layer of food from sitting in a sea of coagulating oil.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n The best thing was wa-gyu teppanyaki<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 Freshly-cooked marbled steak “imported directly from Japan”.\u00c2\u00a0 That was the highlight – I went back twice (as in went once<\/em>, then went BACK<\/strong><\/em> twice).\u00c2\u00a0 Shiawase…<\/p>\n Since the dessert table and the salad table were generally weak, there was no reason to visit them.\u00c2\u00a0 There was, however a crepe station!\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 The processed fruits were bad and sour.\u00c2\u00a0 I was disappointed.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, and\u00c2\u00a0the service table had only chopsticks, steak knives, and plastic crab-splitters.\u00c2\u00a0 No forks.\u00c2\u00a0 No spoons.\u00c2\u00a0 Nothing to eat your mangled-looking crepe with.\u00c2\u00a0 Great.<\/p>\n I suggest going straight for the steak and maybe trying a banana crepe (don’t forget to\u00c2\u00a0bring your own utensils).\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Not as good as Shogun<\/em>, or The Willows<\/em>, or even most hotel buffets -\u00c2\u00a0except for that steak – but I’m not convinced that it was worth the price of admission…<\/p>\n $15 P\/P lunch buffet from\u00c2\u00a011:00-14:00.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well… it’s not poison. Went to Makino-Chaya for lunch today. \u00c2\u00a0They used to be on King Street, but now they are in Aloha Tower\u00c2\u00a0Marketplace.\u00c2\u00a0 Gone is the “tabe-houdai table service”\u00c2\u00a0– it’s just a regular buffet now.\u00c2\u00a0 There were some downtown office people and local buffet-hounds, but a lot of the clientele were the bus-in fresh […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8,12,13],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paJYlx-5R","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}