Matsuda Japanese Cuisine

On the eve of winter my cousins and I decided to go to Matsuda Japanese Cuisine Restaurant since we haven’t had Japanese for quite some time.  This restaurant offers an all you can eat buffet style of Japanese foods.  Although I am not a huge favorite of Japanese buffets, I decided to give this one a go since I have not been to this one before.

We got there late however there were reservations made.  The restaurant was about three-quarters full and the staff was courteous.  This all you can eat buffet is not the type on a conveyor belt or where you have to go up and get type buffets.  It’s the ones you tell the waitress what you want and they will bring it out for you. 

There was a lot of food ordered tonight so it is impossible to tell you everything we ate.  I think the best way to do it is to give you what I thought were some of the better dishes and which ones were less than desirable.

Tataki

Avocado Seafood Salad

Salmon Roses Sushi

My personal favorites of the night were the salmon skin, spicy salmon, tuna and eel hand rolls.  The fish was quite fresh and an added difference to other hand rolls from other places is that they add small pieces of tempura crumbs on top of the hand rolls.  Although the tempura crumbs are tasteless, it is that added different texture and crunchiness that makes this hand roll unique from all the others. 

I also personally enjoyed the herb salmon dish which is only served between Monday to Thursday.  The dish comes with about 20 pieces of other fish however it is the herb salmon that people want.  The salmon are seared on the outside and are then sprinkled with a slightly spicy herb.  It also comes with its own soya sauce although you can certainly use your own self made wasabi soya sauce.  I like this dish because the herbs give the salmon a totally different dimension in taste and not a bad one either. 

The other one I enjoyed was the tataki which is basically raw meat.  It too comes with its own special sauce however there were some at the table who felt that the sauce was a little too soury or minty.  I believe the meat was already briefly marinated in vinegar so there might have been a bit of overkill here.  However I just added the meat to my own self made wasabi soya sauce and it tasted wonderful. 

Beef

Steamed Mussels

Some of the stuff there that I would never try again included the Avocado Seafood Salad.  Even though on the menu they say that it took 25 minutes to make and this was one of their signature dishes, this dish surely was not worth the wait.  It has a very mushy taste to it and the combination of seafood and avocado made it somewhat bitter to taste.  It comes on a seashell but the appearance and color of it also made it less appealing.  

The steamed mussels were also less appealing.  There were chewy and had little to no taste to them.  It was definitely not one of the better dishes of the night.   Some of the makis we ordered were also suspect.  The Matsuda Maki, Philadelphia Maki and Mango Roses Maki were satisfactory although no one could explain to me why they were all so smoky tasting.  I am guessing that it could be part of their maki collection of dishes however I was hoping that not every piece of maki was so smoky tasting. 

Philadelphia Maki

Spicy Salmon Hand Roll

Herb Salmon

Overall it was a satisfactory night.  We ended up clearing the desert menu with a variety of ice creams, mousses and mango puddings.  As mentioned there are pros and cons when having many unique and specialty dishes.  I admit the majority would probably taste good but there will always be one or two that will leave you scratching your head.  The price on the weekdays was about $21.95 per person and a few dollars more on the weekend.  There was plenty of free parking outside and there was plenty of staff to take down your order.  I would give this a 3.5 out of 5.