Japango!

Tuesday night is all-you-can eat sushi buffet night at Japango in Boulder. I had never been there myself but I had heard good things. Since I hadn't eaten volume sushi in a while so I organized a trip with others to go stuff ourselves silly. We had a total of 5 people car-pooling to Boulder from Fort Collins in one 4 Runner. It took about an hour to get to Denver and we got there at ~6:45pm..

Japango does not take reservations but they will take your info down if you call ahead. I am not sure how it really works but we called ahead anyways. After arriving at the restaurant, we were initially told that there would be a 20 minute wait. However, that 20 minute turned into 30-40 minutes when the table that was supposed to be cleared ordered more food. We didn't get to eat until after 7:30pm...

Here is a link that shows a very detailed menu. I like its format better than the official link here. The all-you-can-eat meal is ~$28 and you can pick anything from the menu with the exception of sashimi and maybe some entrees. They have been raising price each year recently since it was ~$24 a few years back -- or so I was told by someone that had been there.

The restaurant is not too big but it was cozy. We read the rules page that essentially said we will be charged $0.50/roll for food ordered but not eaten. That meant we couldn't just pick every item in the menu. See, they don't have a buffet setting where you have to go up to pick whatever food you like. We had to fill out these order forms , which were pretty easy except for the different choices that required time to consider. So we orderd most of the rolls and some appetizers in the first round.

I had ordered myself a seared tuna salad while others got seaweed salad. The seared tuna salad was very fresh and flavorful -- though I was starving so my taste buds might be biased. Then the tempuras, rolls, dynamite, and other dishes showed up... filling the little table we shared. It seemed so daunting that I wondered if we will have left-overs. However, we devoured the food in record time. Our waitress commented that we were like professionals -- i think she meant like those that compete in food eating contest. I really liked the dynamite (mix of seafood/mushroom in a shallow plate that had a tingy spicy flavor), unagi (fresh water eel), spider rolls (called Washington DC roll here), and seared tuna with tempura. The raw sushi rolls were okay too -- but I ate too quickly to taste them. Some liked the waitress but she was not part of the buffet.

Our 2nd order consisted of the better tasting choices from the first round except I added grilled squid dish to the mix. That grilled squid was pretty good. I haven't had grilled squid in years! I had wanted to try more different dishes but somehow the order form was quickly returned to the waitress...

At this time, we were starting to be full... yet there were so many dishes we hadn't tried. We started looking at the "steak" section and wondering how it was prepared. Our fine waitress explained that she thinks the beef steaks were the best deal since they were $24 each -- great, she tells us this when we were almost done! So we tried the beef steak, tuna steak, and some spicy squid for the final round. They were delicious! The beef was really tender and the tuna did not come with rice (pretty much like sashimi!). I wish we had gotten them earlier... maybe next time!

Overall, I would say it was a worthwhile all-you-can-eat buffet. I did not eat as much raw fish as I had originally planned but it was still enjoyable. It did take us a total of ~5 hours counting the traveling time though. We need one of these in Fort Collins!