Shabu Shabu

Location: 380 Lonsdale Street
Link: www.shabushabu.com.au
Cuisine: Japanese, Hotpot

Another all-you-can-eat for $25 place! This time, it's Japanese hotpot. For those who don't know, hotpot involves starting with a pot of boiling stock with a choice of soup bases (here it is chicken or miso) and a choice of dipping sauces (soy, sesame or suki). The food comes around on a conveyor belt, you take what you want off the conveyor belt and add it to your pot.

[chicken broth soup base]

[sesame dipping sauce]

As the servings on the belt are quite small (to prevent wastage), a waiter literally stands at the end of the belt and reloads it continuously. The selection is quite extensive ranging from meats (chicken, beef, lamb and pork), through to seafood (prawns, scallops, mussels, octopus, calamari and fish), and plenty of tofu, fish balls and vegies.

[the conveyor belt of food - hint: if you see prawns or scallops, take them immediately, or you will never get any!!!]

The only negative point was that because we hadn't booked, we were told that we had a 1.5 hour time limit. That did not impress us at all, as we had wanted to make the most of our $25! However, that time limit drove us to consuming excessive amounts of mostly seafood in an attempt to break even with our expenditure! I have a feeling we succeeded!

[just a fraction of the plates we accumulated over the 1.5 hours]

But for the time limitation, the service was quite fast. Empty plates were cleared away quite often, although I would have liked a photo of all the empty plates we had!

Overall rating: 9.5/10