TacoCat's TrEats #174: Yummy All-You-Can-Eat Hotpot Buffet! 😋

taco.cat (67)in #food • last year

Hey Steemit!

Even though there are still people getting covid, it's basically being treated like a cold these days so thankfully almost everything is back to normal now! There are no more restrictions on dining these days and you don't even have to wear a mask anymore if you don't want to! It's a huge relief and this allows us to try out different food places again!

So back in January, I was set to meet up with some of my viewers from my Twitch community! If you've seen my art posts you might've known that I've been streaming on Twitch for a while now. And since I had some stuff to pass to my viewers who won a giveaway we thought it'd be cool if we all went out for a meal together!

They decided on a hotpot buffet so we went to try Shabu Sai at Orchard Central, which is an authentic Japanese restaurant that serves all-you-can-eat Shabu-Shabu and Sukiyaki buffet. They have at least six tasty soup bases and a wide variety of over 40 different items at the buffet table. The brand name comes from the word “Shabu” – the sound of ingredients being swished in a boiling pot – and “Sai” which means vegetables in Japanese.

There are many hotpot restaurant franchises here in Singapore so I often get them confused but this is one I personally have not tried yet, and was curious to see how it works.

We went on a Friday evening so we expected it to be pretty crowded but thankfully it was early enough that there wasn't even a queue when we arrived!

This particular outlet is quite big, with many tables both inside and "outside" the restaurant on either side of the entrance. The restaurant itself is nicely designed as well, with the natural wood furniture and black clay roof tiles (or kawara) and black room dividers reminding me of a traditional Japanese inn (or ryokan).

Each table comes with an induction cooker for the hotpot which looks quite inconspicuous but also makes it easy to clean which is good.

So for the buffet there are a few different options -

Regular Buffet which includes pork and chicken only,
Regular Beef Buffet with pork, chicken and beef, and
Wagyu Beef Buffet with their premium Wagyu Beef, as well as their regular pork, chicken and beef.

Source: 2bearbear.com

We didn't want to splurge on the Wagyu Beef so we went with the Regular Beef Buffet since they wanted to try the beef. After that we had to choose the soups, of which there are 6 choices:

Source: hungryghost

I think we chose the Tonkotsu and Sukiyaki, which I probably wouldn't go for since it's known for being very sweet but is also the common pick for shabu-shabu.

We were shown to our table on the right side of the restaurant and it looked like there were a lot of other young adults eating as well.

There were also some booth seats which looked quite comfortable but sadly they were mostly taken already.

We sat down briefly and a short while later our soup arrived together with two tall stacks of plates of meat!

While waiting for the soup to boil we went to check out the buffet table which is located in the middle of the restaurant just behind the entrance.

The buffet section was chilled since it contains all the raw ingredients from tofu to vegetables and meat. There was definitely an impressive spread and you could also get rice if you wished but since it was a buffet we didn't want to load up on carbs.

We each grabbed a plate or two of whichever ingredients we wanted; I took mostly vegetables and mushrooms. Once our hotpot was boiling we started loading up the pot and pretty soon it was full!

We also added the meat from the many plates we had stacked up on the table, and it was delicious! I thought the beef and pork were really good but the chicken was kinda meh, as these hotpot places usually go. As expected, I found the Sukiyaki soup was way too sweet for me so I had more of the tonkotsu which was a nice lighter option but still a little savoury.

We spent about an hour or so eating and chatting and taking more ingredients and thankfully the service was good so we didn't have to wait long for them to refill our soup pot when it was running low. By the end all of us were so full we couldn't eat any more! It was really good though, and it'd been a long while since I had a hotpot buffet so this was definitely a worthy meal.

If you've yet to try it, I'd highly recommend Shabu Sai. I'd say it's better than a few other hotpot restaurants I've tried here in Singapore, and I'd definitely come back again if I feel like having a buffet.

Thanks so much for reading!