Tairyo Teppanyaki
139 Ruijin Yi Road
Shanghai, China
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I like the word “all-you-can-eat-and-drink”. It makes my heart skip a beat and puts butterflies into my belly. I’m in love! So when suggested we all go to Tairyo Teppanyaki, I got myself all geared up for a Japanese food & alcohol fest . It’s a Japanese chain that has around 50 locations around China, and has fantastic reviews to boot. I’d usually be wary of these places, assuming that they’d scrimp on the meat, so was pleasantly surprised to read that most people were very satisfied.

There were 13 of us in total, from various countries – like a United Nations convention or something 😉 The large restaurant was well-lit, clean and smelled fantastic when we walked in. Service was accomodating and friendly, but wish they’d used a bit of English to make it easier. And the reviews are right – they definitely don’t scrimp on the food and really do give you as much as you want to eat and drink – for 150? (US$22) per person! There was an extensive drinks menu – ranging from hot/cold sake to fresh fruit juices, from chilled plum wine to coconut milk. It was awesome! I drank hot sake, cold sake, plum wine, coconut milk, papaya juice, etc…. I think I drank my weight in liquid 😛

And of course, the food! The star of the show is, by far, their teppanyaki. I say this because we ordered quite a bit of sashimi and I found it all rather poor. Not that it was bad quality, just that it was obviously frozen – so there wasn’t that lovely creamy sashimi taste, and some of the sashimi was actually still half-frozen. Blech!

But we ordered up a STORM of teppanyaki dishes – lamb chops, garlic fried rice, scallops, fillet steak, cod fish, prawns, ox tongue, etc, etc, etc…. Almost one of everything on the menu 😉 It was a phenomenal amount but we managed to stuff it all in *burps*. All the food was great – good quality meat and the chef was a lovely (but shy) guy. Whilst he was cooking, I noticed he shook these small metal canisters over the meat each time – which I assumed was salt/pepper. I also noticed he always used Maggi seasoning sauce to all the meat. So I turned to Chris and said “See how he puts all the same seasonings to all the dishes? It’s kinda boring isn’t it?” which is quite true – I’d have preferred different additions to the meat, because everything ended up tasting about the same!

That didn’t matter much though, because the food was good. Then a few moments in, I felt kinda ill. Got progressively worse and worse and worse through the night, until I was so disorientated I barely knew what was going on, and just kept wanting to puke. It was strange because it hit me SO quickly, and persisted, becoming worse as the night went on. In the end, whilst everyone kicked off for some late-night clubbing/bar-hopping, Chris and I were the old fuddy-duddies that headed home to sleep.. ‘cos I was feeling SO bad.

Tried to have a shower and thought I would fall over with nausea and pain – the water just touching my skin was enough to make me wanna yelp in pain, and my throat was so swollen I couldn’t really swallow, and was starting to run a fever. Chris gave me some Codral (flu/headache medicine) and packed me off to bed where I completely zonked out. The next morning when I woke up, I was OK! Like nothing ever happened.

Kind of weirded out and curious, I thought about it and something in my head just whispered “MSG”, for some reason. Not sure why. So on impulse, I looked up “MSG symptoms” online and pretty much matched it all perfectly – nausea, throbbing headache, throat constriction, pinpricks, disorientation. I figure those are fairly generic symptoms though, so perhaps it could have been something else.. but I suspect a LOT of MSG was added into the food and because it was all-you-can-eat, me being GREEDY me proceeded to vacuum up all the food and perhaps my body couldn’t handle the copious amounts of MSG. Not sure.. *shrug*. Anyway, I suppose I’ll have to be more aware and see if it happens again in future….

Tairyo Teppanyaki

Cold sake and Hot sake. I prefer the former!

Sashimi

Cooking up the tiger prawns

Rolling up the mushrooms with a strip of beef

Cod fish – my favourite, it was so so soft!

Tender, tasty lamp chop

Flaming it all up, with us going “oooooooooooo” in unison

Scallop. Mmm..

Luscious, luscious Banana & Chocolate Cake from Awfully Chocolate

Flaming up the bananas and ice cream

Unbelievably caramelised and sweet. Ooh la la!

Everyone looking quite satisfied and pleased with themselves