This was basically my favourite restaurant when I was a kid, I moved away and didn't go for a long time, but I just went back and it's exactly the same as I remember. They have a good variety of (very Americanized) east Asian food and some country-style American food. As a pescatarian, there's enough variety that I can almost but not quite try a little bit of everything that I want before getting full. For buffet food it's pretty good. The food mostly tastes relatively fresh, save for a few items (seaweed salad, mushroom salad, glazed banana) that tasted like they'd been sitting for a while, but nothing was bad. I tend to avoid the fruit bar, though - it seems like most of the fruit comes out of a can, and the pudding is pretty bland. Their basic sushi can be a little underwhelming, but the more complex rolls are good, and honestly all are better sushi than I'd expect from a buffet. From this visit, the dishes that I really enjoyed were the flounder with crab meat, shrimp cocktail, Japanese-style tofu, and egg custard.
The staff is nice and they're very attentive with refilling drinks and taking away plates that you're done with. Some of them don't seem to speak English super well which might present a little bit of a language barrier, but nothing serious - someone I was with tried to order a drink that they didn't have and confused our waitress who didn't know what he was saying, but she called over another waitress who could understand and they sorted it out.
I saw a few bowls with scrapes of food still in the corners at the buffet, and while the overall cleanliness of the place (besides the bowls) this time was okay, I've seen it looking a little dingy before.
The interior design of the place is very cool - they've got a waterfall into a small koi pond, pagoda-like canopies over the salad station, a lighted floor in places, and the ceiling is painted to look like the sky. There are some elements of it that are very strange to me, though, like the glass (or plastic?) dividers that are filled with what looked like just crumpled paper, and the fish tank with absolutely nothing in it besides fish, not even pebbles in the bottom - it looked clean, but are you really supposed to keep fish in a bare tank like that? I also wish they'd do a better job of labelling the food at the buffet. Most items are labelled correctly, but there were a few with no labels or that were mixed up, or just confusing to figure out which label corresponded to which item. Anyone with any sort of dietary restriction can tell you what a headache it is to try and guess! read more