Ichiban Asian All You Can Eat is a Japanese all-you-can-eat restaurant located in the Splendid China Mall on Steeles Avenue near Kennedy Road in Scarborough.  This restaurant opened sometime in 2016 last year and while I had been curious about it, I didn’t get a chance to visit it until this past Friday evening.  

Ichiban All You Can Eat has a salad bar and dessert station where you can select items from in addition to using their iPad ordering system on the table to order as many Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and Korean dishes as you want in a 1.5 to 2-hour time limit.  Similar to other Japanese all-you-can-eat restaurants, they served sashimi, sushi rolls, hand rolls, udon, ramen, tempura items, and many more.

We made reservations for our dinner for three here at 7:30 p.m. and had asked about their birthday cake rules too.  They offered a cake handling service for free, provided a free slice of cake for the birthday guest, and their staff came out to sing happy birthday too!

It was a very straight-forward evening of dining in and using the iPad to order what we wanted to eat.  Everything was clearly organized according to food categories.  To my surprise and satisfaction, after we ordered our food and submitted the order, the food arrived almost instantaneously.  We didn’t have to worry about any items that were missed either (except I do recall that one item didn’t come).  Otherwise, the food was pretty good and there were several unique items that I hadn’t seen before in Japanese all-you-can-eat restaurants before.  This included the steamed baos with Korean stir-fried beef, duck sushi rolls, and sashimi chips.

The Boiled chicken with Chinese herbs and mushroom soup was one of my favourite items all evening.  I technically could have drank this instead of tea all night. 😀

The white tuna sashimi was sooo thin and so delicious!  The Torched Duck Sushi was also really good.  I liked how thin the torched duck was.

Fresh and delicious sashimi.  I loved the salmon and scallop sashimi especially. ❤

The Beef Sashimi was also sliced ultra thin and tasted good.

The fried shrimp were firm and tasted good.

I loved the Grilled Okra and the salad dressing that it came with!  We ordered another one of these since it was so good.  These okra were smaller than the usual ones I’ve eaten.

I’ve never seen this at an all-you-can-eat restaurant before:  Korean spicy beef and steamed bao.  I loved the soft fluffy bao and the moderately spicy beef.  It also came with sliced zucchini too.  It was really good.

The grilled lamb racks were very tender and well seasoned.  We were all surprised at how tender it was.  We were expecting AYCE standards for the grilled lamb to be chewy, but it wasn’t at all!

The chip sashimi was overhyped in my mind so that when I actually tried it, I wasn’t too satisfied with it.  It was literally sashimi on top of a Pringle chip. XD  The crunchiness of the chip was a nice texture but I thought that the ‘spicy salmon sashimi’ wasn’t actually spicy at all.

My mom really enjoyed the udon with seafood.  I liked the portion of it.

This fried black rice with eel was really good!  I wish I finished more of it but I was so full towards the end of the meal that I couldn’t eat either bite…

I loved the grilled eggplant and especially how it was grilled entirely as one.

I loved the grilled zucchini too.  It was so juicy!

Smooth and delicious steamed egg.

These Enoki Beef Rolls were a little on the tough side…

The Tempura Banana was all right.  I also ordered Green Tea ice cream and its flavour was very dense but it was quite melted when it got to the table.

All in all, the delicious sashimi stood out for me as well as the grilled eggplant, steamed egg, chicken soup with herbs and mushroom (from the salad bar), lamb ribs, Torched Duck Sushi, and beef sashimi.  The sashimi were sliced so thinly!

When it came time for the birthday cake to come out, the server diligently cleared our table and I could see that he was motioning to the other servers to stop what they were doing and get ready for the singing.  Very quickly, the ‘happy birthday’ song began playing from the speakers and all of the staff came around to sing the song.  It was a really elaborate birthday affair for the birthday guest and I really appreciated the gesture.  Since we had brought a cake into the restaurant, they lit a candle and set it down on the table for us.  They provided the plates and cutlery too for us to cut the cake ourselves.  There was also another guest that night at another time who was celebrating a birthday.  For that guest, since they didn’t have a cake, I saw that the restaurant provided a small slice of cake for the birthday guest.  That was nice too.  It made me curious about what the birthday cake actually was and if we didn’t bring a cake, we would have been able to enjoy that one. XD

We left within the two-hour mark by 9 p.m.  By this time, we were one of the few tables remaining since most people had left already.

Overall, I enjoyed the Japanese all-you-can-eat dinner at Ichiban All You Can Eat. 🙂  I really liked their professional and polite service.  I advise that if you go, try going during their weeknights or during lunch hours so that the AYCE price is more worth it.