Summer Feast

In lieu of marking the end of summer, we marked it as a pre-celebration for a friend's birthday.

Hot Pot!

 My friends and I went out again, this time to celebrate an upcoming birthday. This outing, we visited two restaurants, the first being "I Cook Buffet".

Contrary to the namesake, there is no buffet during lunch time. Instead, they offer you a set combo in which you can customize things such as the soup base and meat.

The food was nothing special, thinly sliced pieces of meat plus random greens and a few more random fish balls. And of course, our favourite condiment, some weird salty peanut sauce. /sarcasm.

Peanut Sauce?

So you may ask yourself, why is the peanut sauce gone? Did we use it all? Yes we did, but we didn't consume it. Instead, we decided to pour all the sauce into one pot and boil it. Boy was that a bad idea, the fumes that emitted from the pot was deadly and could be sniffed from miles.

Service was mediocre at best. No,  for where I live, most restaurants are Chinese owned/operated so their English may not be perfect. This one is no different. Not only was their English poor, the employees seemed clueless about the menu as if they were new to the job (maybe they were).

Anyways, we decided to head back into familiar territory for dinner, Sushi on 7.

We ordered the usual: salmon & hokkigai & butterfish sashimi and a few maki rolls. Most of the sashimi seemed fresh, but some of it wasn't thawed out enough.

But we also got something different this time, the spider roll. The spider roll consists of avocado, roe, imitation crab stick and deep fried soft shell crab.

The spider roll

Dragon roll and sashimi

In general, Japanese AYCE in our area are decent, but not spectacular in any way. We've gone to a few AYCE, but this one seems the be one with consistent quality.

How is your experience with AYCE places? Have you tried hot pots (or shabu shabu) before?