Some time in the last year or so I learned a new acronym called AYCE, standing for All You Can Eat, most of the time referring to Sushi Buffet while sometimes it can be applied to Korean BBQ.Normally AYCE sushi charges around $15 for lunch and $20 for dinner, give and take a few dollars. Obviously, for the most part, it's never really "worth it" to go to AYCE or else these places would not be making money.
In order to cut down waste, since when things are free people tend to take more than they can finish, AYCE restaurants will threaten to charge you if you have too much leftover at your table. However, in a relatively busy but unorganized restaurant as such Ye's Sushi in Waterloo, where they have almost no competition, wasting seems to be almost inevitable.
For most people, you don't go to AYCE unless you are really hungry. If you are really hungry, you want to eat right away. You start with ordering a lot of food and a lot of the time, the food will take a long time to come or it will not come at all - but you are never really sure which is which.
So, for example, you order the first round and it takes about 20 minutes for about half of the food to get to your table. Realizing how long the service takes and how hungry you are, you decide that you should order the second round before your first round is even served. By the time half of the food from the second round is served, you realize that some of the stuff you ordered in the first round isn't here yet. Are they just really late or should we order again? If you ask the servers, they won't know and if you really want the food and you are still feeling hungry (in spite of the vast amount of food still sitting at your table from first and second round), you will order again. Sometimes the food will come twice. Sometimes by the time the food does come, you are already full.
Last week, when we went to Ye's sushi with Adam's sister and cousin, I ordered a dish of squid towards the end of our meal because I still had room to eat. It came after we finished eating our ice cream, resulting in us cramming the food down so we dont get charged.
Today was even more ridiculous. Thirteen really hungry students ordering mass amount of food that came really slowly and half of the food didn't come at all for the first three rounds. At one point, one of Adam's friends got really fed up and ordered 20 tempura shrimps and like 5 rolls because he didnt get to eat half of the stuff he wanted to eat. However, when you order in that quantity, the order gets backlogged. Our side of the big table was also ordering tempura in smaller amounts, like 5-8, so it kept coming and we kept passing it to their side of the table. At the end of the meal, when the restaurant was not as busy, all the rolls and tempuras arrived. Needless to say, we were beyond full. A lot of the food was crammed and split open on plates and inside sauces to make it look like we finished the food. On top of which, lunch buffets don't serve sashimi so to eat salmon sashimi, you have to order to salmon sushi (fish on top of rice) and the guys would just eat whats on the top and leave the rice around.
Watching that much food get wasted is really really frustrating. All You Can Eat suddenly turned to All You Can Waste. I don't approve of the way Adam's friend ordered all that food, but it is not soley his fault. AYCE sushi restaurants really should
- Organize their system better so that people know whether or not the food is coming (they have machines in Vancouver and Japan to keep these things in order).
- Find a way to cut cost without using rice as a means to keep people from eating sashimi. Just because rice is cheaper than other types of food does not mean it should be wasted in this manner.
- Don't order in bulks when the restaurant is busy. It's hard when you have a big table and everyone is hungry; but perhaps the alternative is to give them a bunch of orders consecutively in smaller amounts so that the food will (hopefully) come faster.
Posts
2 comments:
Niko Niko
lets hit it up this wknd!
Post a Comment