Review: Hibachi Grill & Buffet*

1255 Woodruff Rd
Greenville, SC 29607

Cost: $11.64 for buffet and tea

Greenville Online was much kinder to this restaurant than I am going to be. It is true that they have a 200-item buffet. That does little good when everything I tried was at best mediocre, and at worst NASTY.

I do like the fact that they used an old Ryan's building that has been sitting empty. It's good to have new businesses in town, and to have that vacancy filled right in the middle of Woodruff Road is a good thing, which is why I suppose Greenville Online was inclined to be charitable. Either that or they didn't actually eat there.

I expected an inexpensive retro-fit, but they have done a really nice job of remodelling. I didn't feel like I was in an old Ryan's when I walked in. The entrance foyer is fairly impressive, and you can tell that they spent some money on this place. The restrooms have been completely re-modelled also. I had to rinse some spit-up out of a sink when I went in there to wash my hands, but it was otherwise very nice. I cut them some slack for that because it was height of the dinner rush. The decor is pretty classy for a Chinese buffet. Kinda gaudy, but I wasn't exactly expecting the Renaissance, ya know?

I am not really a food snob. If I find good food anywhere, I will eat it; if it comes on a china plate or in a paper cone. I also enjoy Chinese buffet, which is kind of a genre of it's own. Sometimes things aren't at their best after they sit for a while, and so I understand the unique challenge of keeping food costs down by putting out things that will last sitting on a steam table for a while. The fact remains that other restaurants seem to have met this challenge much better than Hibachi has.

First, a Hibachi is a small Japanese heating device, but is usually used in American parlance to refer to a cooking grill. I didn't see a single grilled item on the buffet, so I guess they were referring to the Mongolian Grill prominently placed at the front of the restaurant. I don't care for Mongolian Grill (if I could season my own Mongolian food, I would do so at home and just eat there), but Russ and Billy are great fans of it. They said the Mongolian Grill here wasn't very good. I didn't try it. Incidentally, R&B had already warned me off of this place, but there have been big crowds there and I was curious. I wish I had listened to R&B.

Everything I ate tonight tasted, well, kind of off. Like it just wasn't right. Like a minor adjustment in seasoning or cooking time would have made it exponentially better.

I had fried shrimp that were a bit mushy, and I'm not sure how they did that. I'm thinking now that it had to be some kind of shrimp mush (chopped salad shrimp? leftover shrimp from other dishes?) molded around an actual shrimp tail, then breaded and fried to disguise it. They do this with "crab claws" on some buffets.

The spring rolls had enough 5-spice powder in them that they tasted just a bit like household cleaner.

Although it was the height of the dinner rush, the baked artificial crab I had was dried out and a bit too chewy. It didn't have much flavor.

I also tried a dish called "buttered triple delight" or something like that. It looked to be a seafood medley. There are two types of fake crab. One is made from fish (generally Alaskan Pollock, if you're curious), and actually has a crab-like texture (that was what was baked above). The other is a gelatinous potato-based product that has a pretty nasty mouth-feel. Two of the three "delights" in this dish were this gelatinous potato product, just cut differently. The third was shrimp that was fine, but not exceptional. The sauce was fairly tasteless and very greasy (apparently just melted margarine). The fake crab in this was bad enough that I picked it out and didn't eat it, and I generally don't pick through my food.

The "Hibachi Shrimp" I presume was a house dish, since it hadn't been anywhere near a grill. The sauce on that made it the tastiest thing I had there, but it was so greasy I couldn't eat that much of it.

I tried a "treasure shrimp", which was apparently stuffed with a pork mixture. It was very greasy, and fairly nasty-tasting to boot. I was glad I only got one. I wouldn't have eaten a second, and I don't like to waste food.

The "black pepper shrimp" was presumably supposed to be like salt and pepper shrimp, which I really like, but it didn't really taste of salt or pepper. It didn't have much flavor at all.

The worst thing I had was a little stuffed crab shell. Now I enjoy the ones that have all that stuffing and spices in them. They have a good flavor, if light on the crab. This was something else entirely. The shell was very small, and seemed to be stuffed with stale greasy crumbs of some kind. I didn't find any crab, real or artificial. And then the taste hit me - it was sweet. Ugh. That was the last straw. I only ate one bite of the one I put on my plate, and although frankly very little goes in my mouth that comes back out again, that one bite was a close call. I wonder now if they used stale leftover cookies for the crumbs, because they were egg-yolk yellow, like the almond cookies. Whatever it was it was GROSS.

The cream cheese wantons (or crab rangoons, or whatever you call them, they seem to have a myriad of names) were done in very thin, like phyllo dough wrappers. That I would have enjoyed (a lot of places skimp on the filling, and you end up chewing your way through a too-long-ago-fried chewy wanton wrapper), but they had actually been over-stuffed. You ended up with a large glob of cream cheese kind of gummed up in your mouth. They would actually have been better if they had been smaller.

The cheese sticks had been deep-fried and were very greasy, as if they had been double-dipped in the hot oil when they got cold the first time. They were also very salty, and I'm not sure why. When you bit into them, it was like little oil pockets under the crust flooded your mouth with excess oil. Not pleasant.

After all that, I was pretty full, and with the quality of the food I was frankly leery of trying the sushi at all.

The desserts were the usual pre-packaged Chinese fare, and weren't stale or anything, but there was nothing there you couldn't get at a better buffet.

In short, I would never go here again, and would recommend that you don't either. For the exact same price, you can go right down the street to Ni Hao. It's across from The Shops at Greenridge in the old Bob Evans building. The food there is at least three times as good. You have been warned.