Competitive Buffets: Sushi
Posted on | December 26, 2009 | 2 Comments
While waiting for my mom to call me back and fetch her, our caregiver, and my grandmother after the latter’s hemodialysis session in Makati, I along with a College friend met up to supposedly watch Avatar in 3D at SM Mall of Asia’s iMax theater. A call to the box office early in the morning told us that 130+ seats for the 4:50 pm showing were still vacant, so off we went. Come 4:00 pm however, all show times for Avatar were already sold out! So much for the hype.
To compensate for the failed attempt at watching Avatar in 3D today, we decided to go around the mall and eat somewhere interesting enough to distract us from our loss. First place we saw while walking around: Sakae Sushi (2/F, iMax side and towards the front of the main building of MOA). For around PhP 400 per adult, a sushi buffet on conveyor belt (kaiten zushi) could be had along with bottomless hot or cold green tea and a small bowl of Miso soup. This happened to not be our first time to eat at the said kaiten zushi restaurant, so we were somewhat veterans at its buffet game. It was like watching free market forces at work.
Here are some tips from our experience:
1) The waitress wanted to seat us at a seemingly comfortable position towards the end of the conveyor belt. This, however, is not the optimal place to be. The color-coded (we’ll get to that later) plates of sushi come out from a single source point: the kitchen. To get first picks at the sushi plates as they come out, the best place to be seated would be as close as possible to the kitchen window. Don’t worry – this is a cold kitchen, so to speak – no smoke or warm air coming out.
2) Hold back on the green tea and the miso soup. Resist the charms of the waitress who will keep on refilling your cold glass; avoid playing with the hot water tap to refill your little mug. Neither should you be too excited with the miso soup. Remember that matter occupies space and has mass, and that your stomach – though expandable – has a finite volume and is not a blackhole.
3) Maximize your profits as the consumer: watch the colors of the plates. In decreasing order of cost, the plates’ colors are: red (PhP 99), green (PhP 79), yellow (PhP 49), and blue (PhP 39). It would be in your best interest to stack more of the reds and greens – you’d like to stock your body’s warehouse with more valuable (and hence better-tasting) stuff. Newbies at this game will typically gobble up any plate that comes their way, regardless of color.
4) Take your time. There are quotas per plate and kind of sushi. There is no time limit as to the buffet; you’ll notice that the sushi chef will release – at timed intervals – certain kinds of sushi.
Feel free to improve on the above tips with your own! 
Comments
2 Responses to “Competitive Buffets: Sushi”
Leave a Reply
December 27th, 2009 @ 12:16 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Albert Domingo, Albert Domingo. Albert Domingo said: Competitive kaiten (conveyor) sushi buffet – http://bit.ly/6txwMP [...]
December 27th, 2009 @ 10:14 am
wow, will try this out!