don’t tell me it’s morning already

at the behest of my dad, we went to try out Shogun at One Utama. We’d been wanting to try it out for a long time, but never got around to doing it, everytime we wanted to go (and had the money to go) it was all crowded and all.

so! It wasn’t very crowded today, so we thought we’d pop in and try it out. At first glance it seemed pretty good… spacious layout and seemed like a very good variety of choices in food and all, much better than its parent restaurant Saisaki, at least.

those were first impressions. The food, I must say, for the most part was too salty and a lot of it didn’t taste very good. The unagi (barbecued eel) was hard and rubbery, and many other things from the cooked food section just didn’t really have any other flavor rather than salty. Even such a novelty as Peking duck rolls just failed to take off. The situation just remained dire at the teppanyaki counter, which didn’t have much taste at all. At least tempura couldn’t really go wrong.

as for sushi, most of it was good, especially the hana maki (something like flower petal rolls, with a good sized portion of raw salmon wrapping it) which was excellent and the fact that I could have as many of them as I wanted was a big attraction. However, the sushi rice was a let down, which led me to…

sashimi! I was anticipating eating platefuls of the stuff. Normally at Jap buffets I’d be taking a mound of sake sashimi (raw salmon), however, this wasn’t the case this time as the salmon didn’t really taste fresh. They must have used up the good stuff for the hana maki and…

salmon with honey mustard? sounded rather off, but delicious since I love honey mustard. And so that took the place of all the salmon sashimi I could eat… I basically took almost an entire plateful of it. So that was where all the fresh salmon went…

overall, I was actually rather disappointed with Shogun. I don’t know if my expectations started off too high but for the price one pays (it’s rm48++ per person) I would have at least expected better. As it is, it’s not a place I would boycott, but I would cautiously return once or twice to see if they’ve improved any. If going, my advice is to take very small portions of food until the actual good and edible dishes are identified.

my rating: 5.3/10 and the next time I go to a Jap buffet, I hope it will be back to Nagisa (Sunway Lagoon Resort) which has an excellent Jappy buffet and when in season, fresh strawberries!!!!! :p