Holiday Inn Nagasaki.
Now there are Japanese buffet restaurants too. What to think? Service and presentation are such a big part of Japanese cuisine, and the food is nothing you want to leave on display. Then again, I grew up in the suburbs myself. I know what it's like to go out to dine wearing sweatpants and risk iodine poisoning via all-you-can-eat shrimp. So here's what I imagined, when I first heard about Minado: platters of gleaming sushi. With enough takers to keep the stock turning over, you know, a sushi smorgasbord could work. Or so I hear from relatives who eat in Japan.
Minado, however, comes to Manhattan via New Jersey. Regardless, I figured, the newcomer might offer decent maki rolls. Those should be packed with enough rice to keep virtually giving them away cost-effective.
Turns out I was pipe-dreaming, and the sushi at Minado is pretty much a bust. Though the tuna, salmon, yellowtail and eel are far from awful, there's just not enough going on to fairly call what's done with them sushi. The rice is not properly seasoned, and its texture is pure Uncle Ben's. The cuts of fish are unappealingly flat and lifeless. It wasn't enough to serve a smaller-than average cut on a smaller-than-average ball of rice, apparently. With its papery slices, Minado purposefully unbalances the traditional rice-to-seafood ratio. That's just wrong. So is the restaurant's entire section of mayo-salad sushis. It comes off as if the Poughkeepsie Holiday Inn decided to offer sushi on their salad bar.
The maki rolls taste okay, but again the presentation is abominable. Each piece has the dimensions of a juice-bottle cap. They're maki discs. Extending the diameter are superfluous cucumbers and, sometimes, rock-hard chunks of unripe avocado. Lacking density and harmony, these misshapen makis are no fun to eat.
It does get better. Among the three dozen non-sushi dishes on the all-you-can-eat buffet ($24 on weekdays, $26 weekends) are a couple surprises.
Minado's beef tataki, for example, is an excellent example of this soy-and-sake steak dish. Served very rare, it's usually tender or flavorful?Minado's is both. Right next to the beef tataki are thin slices of pork in an interesting sweet-and-sour sauce. Again the meat was tender, but it was the tiny pink steaks we deemed worthy of filling up on.
The seaweed salads demonstrated further skill with cold Japanese dressings. The black hijiki was alive with brewed soy and rice vinegar, while a blend of green hakami and hiyashi felt like a preternaturally healthful plate of crunchy spaghetti. Crisp oshitashi (cold spinach) was pleasantly sprinkled with sesame seeds. Bok choy with mushrooms featured another delicate cold sauce?almost everyone in our large party reloaded their supply of that dish at least once.
Allowing fried dishes to sit out for any length of time at a buffet is an absolute no-no, so the trick is to goal-hang and try to catch a fresh batch. That didn't work too well with the crab cakes, because Minado's are made with fake crab. And it didn't work with the tempura vegetables, either, because those arrived already soggy with grease. It didn't work with the fried stuffed lobster tails, because the re-ups were slow to arrive and we missed them. We did sample heads-on fried shrimp on skewers, which were lovable in a sort of corn-doggy way.
If you decide to try Minado, go straight for the grill area?a flat metal grill, no flame, much like one that short-order cooks use. Here, it's kept super hot, and the cook on the job is highly skilled. He does small amounts of beef, chicken, shrimp or scallops by request, and it's worth the wait. The beef is a hot, manly version of that tender, cold tataki. The white-meat chicken tastes of fresh scallions. The shellfish are less interesting, though just as well-handled.
What else? There's a soup area with miso, crab soup and limited elements for designing your own udon. Japanese variants of Korean dishes, including jellyfish noodles and scallops in red-pepper sauce, help keep things interesting without taking the focus off Japan.
The teriyaki salmon in the hot-food section is rich and flavorful?an easy way for unadventurous diners to get their money's worth. Bolder eaters will want to try the oysters in ponzu sauce, but take my advice and skip it. There is no reward for bravery at Minado.
For dessert there's moderately fresh pineapple, cantaloupe, honeydew and grapes, as well as factory-made cakes (mocha, blueberry or strawberry, depending on the day) and fruit tarts also of the corner-deli variety. Minado's best dessert by far is its coconut cookies (not always available), which look like little wood chips and taste more like animal crackers than coconut. Desserts are covered under the buffet price; drinks (even tea) are not.
The room is gargantuan even by New Jersey standards, and it feels neither festive nor serene. Buffets usually profit, atmospherically speaking, from everybody being thrown together. It opens people up a bit, and openness goes well with food. The mostly Asian weekend crowd at Minado struck me as somewhat uptight. The scene at the grill gets a little edgy.
Take the propriety out of a Japanese dining experience, it seems, and you're left with something other than a Japanese dining experience. That's a big problem. Not as egregious as tempura going limp in a chafing dish, but almost.