Good for all-you-can-eat, we have been several times and will definitely continue to go back.
The service is generally pretty good, and we got everything we ordered on the first go (we had a large and complex order) which we haven't at other all-you-can-eat places. Good variety in the menu, and, though quantities aren't listed on the menu (I agree that they should be), the servers are pretty good at making sure you are getting the quantities you requested if there is something weird.
As for freshness, I have never had a problem, and we have never ordered anything there that we have actively disliked, and we definitely have some fan-favourites that we order a lot of.
Having a largeish group with some fairly big eaters ensured that we don't over-order, but you can always order more if you don't get enough the first time. If you do have big eaters in your group, this is the only way to do sushi and have everyone satisfied!
I've been a couple of times, and will go again with colleagues or friends.
I agree their portion sizes should be on the menu - we ordered 4 of this and 2 of that, and wound up with twice as much of "that" as "this". But the servers keep it coming, so just order 1 of each thing then you'll know to get 3 more of a certain item next time around. We treated it like dim sum - you don't order a whole meal, you order this helping and then see what comes next.
The price is very good; I can see why they don't want people just ordering two tableloads of extras for this price - but certainly if she's about to order 2 people enough food for 8, she should double-check with the customer first.
We had such cautions from our server - are you sure you want 4 ORDERS of those, or did you mean 4 of those cause they come 4 to a plate. Maybe it's just luck of the draw with server and timing; no doubt when they're very busy they just hand in the orders without reading them carefully first.
All you can eat for 11 or 12 bucks a head is pretty good. If we over-ordered one item, it was a large enough group somebody would finish it up. A tasty assortment that acommodated a vegetarian, a wheat allergy, sushi lovers and fish haters in our group. Beyond sushi and other rolls, there's rice and chicken teriyaki, chicken skewers, etc. so everyone was happy.
Food that is below average standard, accompanied by the worst service.
This Japanese buffet restaurant has been around for about 2 years. When it first started in business, the raw fish that they served were not fresh at all (some even started to turn gray!)
Today (June 19 2008), my uncle and I went to try out Sushi Kan again by an recommendation of a friend who claimed that the restaurant had improved a lot. When we arrived, I was impressed by the high volume of people that were eating there.
After we set down, the waitress then spent around 5 seconds to explain to me how the item quantity in each sections on the menu differed. For example, each order of shrimp tempura had 2 tempuras, each order Roll sushi contained 6 pieces, each order of nigiri sushi contains 1-piece, and so on. I was quickly confused and wasn't paying much attention to the waitress because of the noisy background. At first I thought all of that "ordering instruction" would be on the menu anyway, because, really, which restaurant would expect a customer to remember all that information in a 5 sec explanation given by the server. After the waitress left, I took a good look at the menu and stunted by the fact that I could not find anything she said in there.
Anyways, we started ordering food by writing them down on a piece of paper. We started with an order of the shrimp tempura, few pieces of nigiri sushi. The sushi rice was hard, and the shrimp tempura was obviously not freshly made and was not even warm when served. After 30 - 40 minutes, we asked for the bill. At the moment, we were greeted with 18-pieces of spicy white tuna sushis. At first we thought it was a mistake because we only made 3 order of the spicy white tuna sushi (which from my understanding, each order should contain 1 piece only). Then the waitress rudely explained that each order actually had 6-pieces. At first, I tried to cancel half of the 18 pieces by reasoning with her that I made an honest mistake. She then went on telling us that we had to either finish all 18 pieces or pay for everything that we cannot finish and, in our case, it would be 9 dollars ($1 for 2 pieces). Paying an extra $9 for a $13 lunch was clearly not worth it, so we were pretty much forced to finish all the pieces that we didn't mean to order. After we struggled to finish everything, we paid (even left tips despite the rudeness we received from the waitress) and left the restaurant. As we walked out to the door, we could hear a few servers laughing behind our back.
Really, I don't believe the restaurant should rely on the servers to pass us the information by the word of mouth. They should either print the information on the menu. If they can't fit that into the menu for some ridiculous reason, they should at the very least put a sign on table. I don't think we were the first group who were troubled by the confusing ordering information. Or perhaps the restaurant purposely left that important piece of info out of the menu in the hope that customer would fall for it and end up paying more.
