Nobu’s all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch ($110 per person, $55 for children 5-12 years old) is sprinkled throughout the second floor of the restaurant. As you’re guided to your table, hot food and carving stations line the walkway, doing a great job of whetting your appetite. Front and centre in the bright dining room is the sushi bar, where a team of chefs continuously turns out maki and nigiri. Off in the corner sits the dessert table, with a ceviche and spicy cucumber salad ice bar tucked in for good measure.

I appreciated how the food stations are spaced out. There’s no dreaded bottleneck of diners waiting, nor that frantic urge to grab everything at once just to avoid lining up again.

Chef Nobu Matsuhisa was one of the pioneers of Japanese-Peruvian cuisine back in the mid-90s. At the time, dishes like spicy tuna crispy rice and yellowtail crudo felt fresh and exciting, while miso black cod became a signature that kept people coming back. These are still dishes I enjoy, but decades later they’ve been copied endlessly, making what’s served at Nobu feel far less groundbreaking than it once was.

If you’re going for the miso black cod, make sure you get it hot. My first bite, taken from a platter that had been sitting, was bland and slightly fishy. A second round, straight from a freshly placed tray, was noticeably better. It’s tasty, but it didn’t rank among the best miso cods I’ve had.

The crispy rice station is a great idea in theory, but the execution falters. The wooden spoons make it awkward to scoop up the rice nuggets, and many of the serving utensils (spring-hinged chopsticks and oversized soup ladles) are poorly suited for a buffet.

Thankfully, the soft-serve ice cream station sits right beside the crispy rice, so I grabbed a simple stainless steel teaspoon. It turned out to be the perfect tool for neatly dolloping finely chopped tuna, salmon, and mashed avocado onto each bite. The crispy rice itself would benefit from being thinner and longer for easier spreading and eating.

Unsurprisingly, the sushi was underwhelming, even when taken from freshly dropped plates. The rice was bland and too cold, though at least the pieces were kept small, letting the fish take centre stage. All things considered, it’s better than most buffet sushi, though I usually steer clear of buffet sushi stations altogether.

Some of my favourite bites ended up being the unexpected ones. Nobu’s Greek salad has a generous feta-to-vegetable ratio that leans salty but spooning it over the garden salad below helps balance things out nicely.

The prime rib carving station also drew me back for seconds. While the meat quality wasn’t exceptional, the variety of sauces made it fun to sample and customize each bite.

Despite not having a big sweet tooth, I found it hard to resist the dessert spread. The pandan-laced crème brûlée and flan-like matcha panna cotta were standouts. Just do yourself a favour and skip the dry Earl Grey beignets.

Nobu offers something for everyone including the breakfast staples of bacon, sausage, tater tots, and eggs. Just be warned: their scrambled eggs are the ultra-soft, almost runny style popular in many Asian cuisines, which isn’t for everyone.

Nobu’s Sunday brunch is fun and indulgent - just don’t expect to be blown away by anything. It’s worth doing once for the experience and is a great option for an unhurried catch-up with loved ones (they did not kick us out after 2 hours). Some hits, some misses, and plenty of options to keep everyone at the table happy. Just make sure you grab the good stuff while it’s hot.

It’s been years since I’ve been to a traditional buffet, where there are food stations to select to your heart’s content. As a child, we’d visit them for large family dinners - our parents were glad there were enough options to satisfy picky tastes and we could leave the table to walk around without them being judged. Somehow, we stopped going as my cousins and I became better behaved and our parents’ appetites shrunk.

With the plethora of seafood options, my first plate was dedicated to crustaceans and fish. A lady stands guard overly freshly shucked oysters, cold sea snails and chilled crab legs, ensuring items like the raw oysters are kept sanitary. From the hot section, the baked garlic scallops in shell were tiny but delicious. 

I had all this before realizing there was another seafood tower on the other side of the room, filled with mussels, snail, octopus tendrils, and cocktail shrimp! The restaurant is a place for seafood lovers, offering even more choice on weeknights when there’s also crawfish and baked oysters (on Wednesday), and stir-fried BC crab (on Thursday).

I’ll admit, the doughnuts smell better than they taste as they’re oily. Perhaps it’s my fault, I had to get the freshly fried ones that just dropped off the conveyor belt. Maybe if I took them from the basket and gave them a chance to drain it would be drier. Nonetheless, adding some red bean ice cream to it and forming a doughnut ice cream sandwich made the oiliness less noticeable.  

• Anything under 5 - I really disliked and will never go back
• 6 - decent restaurant but I likely won't return
• 7 - decent restaurant and I will likely return
• 8 - great restaurant that I'd be happy to recommend
• 9 - fantastic restaurant that I would love to visit regularly and highly recommend
• 10 - absolute perfection!

• KAKA All You Can Eat
• Colette Grand Cafe

• The BBQ chicken was moist, brushed in a sweet caramelized glaze.
• Pick your piece of jerk pork carefully as with various cuts the all-meat ones are tougher. I found a smaller thick piece with the bone-in and that was succulent. Yet, the jerk sauce was too mild and I had to add hot sauce. Kaibo: consider offering warmed jerk sauce on the side as sriracha and Tabasco doesn’t have the same flair.
• Similarly, even though the Cayman style fish has scotch bonnets in the recipe, the most prominent flavours was from the tomatoes and onions.

• Anything under 5 - I really disliked and will never go back
• 6 - decent restaurant but I likely won't return
• 7 - decent restaurant and I will likely return
• 8 - great restaurant that I'd be happy to recommend
• 9 - fantastic restaurant that I would love to visit regularly and highly recommend
• 10 - absolute perfection!

• Agua
• Pappagallo