How much should you eat at an eat-all-you-can?
The metro isn’t short of Filipino pleasure houses we call “buffet”: Vikings, Cabalen, Kamayan, Yakimix, Red Box, Center Stage, and Tong Yang, among many others. How much should you eat to get the best value for your money? The answer is simple: it depends on how much your stomach can, well, stomach. Go below your satisfaction level and you don’t get your money’s worth; go beyond your satiety (that is, over-eat), and you charge yourself more, with uneasiness or indigestion.
Yakimix
Some suggestions for good buffets in the city include Yakimix and Tong Yang. Their choices of food for cooking is wide (seafoods and meat) and their sushi offerings are aplenty. Deserts in Yakimix are better than those in Tong Yang because it’s as if their sweets are straight out of decent hotels; they have mallows and gummy candies too for the kids.
Tong Yang
When you enter Tong Yang, wait to be seated and asked what soup base you prefer (chicken, sinigang/sour, spicy). You’ll be served with cubes of butter to fry your choices of food from the buffet table. You can start gathering your “ingredients” as soon as you feel like it. Mike and I would always get veggies and seafoods and fry or boil these in chicken or sinigang soup, which is constantly replenished.
These buffets cost 400-600 per head, and they are best enjoyed with friends who have stories-all-you-can.
