We went to Bon Shabu restaurant on Monday, January 2, 2022 – day after New Years. Overall the place doesn’t seem to be staffed properly and your dining experience may be a draw of luck. It’s a fancy looking place that charges $60 per person during dinner for AYCE shabu shabu (when other places charge $30) and their menu boasts expensive sounding 4 types of wagyu, 5 types of prime beef and other unusual meats like lamb.

Their Facebook page posted a week ago that “reservation through Facebook direct message strongly recommended”, but I messaged on Facebook and got no response. It’s been 3 days, and the Facebook message still does not have the “read” checkmark.

We went in, and there were about 20 customers and 15 workers (waiters/cleaning/serving staff). After we were seated by the front desk staff, it took 20+ minutes for another staff to come by and take our meats order. After waiting another 20+ minutes, we talked to 2 other staff and one of them ran to the kitchen saying “yes! we’ll get you the meat!” and came back with 4 trays, but I have no idea whether those were our orders. We ordered 3 meats. Also, all in all a Shabu Shabu is not the type of cooking where we can savor the improved texture and flavor of wagyu. Was it even wagyu? Who knows. It’s beef, it’s fine.

And after the first order of meat came in, that was the end of it. No one ever approached us ever again. All waitstaff were running around, busily carrying trays of meat, talking to customers, going back and forth from the kitchen. Another table of customers who arrived after we did got more orders than we did. We kinda felt bad trying to grab and talk to the waitstaff beause they were permanently on a rush, carrying things. After a long time, we grabbed someone to ask, who again apologized and brought trays of meat. This time, we didn’t even know what meat we were getting, because he didn’t take any orders. He just brought us random trays of meat. We really had to hunt down waitstaff to get our one bottle of water, and some trays of meat.

We were getting hungry, and ate half of our stuff from the salad/side dishes bar. The side dishes section include some cooked meat: fried chicken, ttokbokee fishcake, chinese-style fried chicken, bulgogi, spicy bulgogi. We mostly ate those while trying to get our next meats tray. Having those precooked meats on the salad bar saved the night, because otherwise we would have been very hangry trying to catch the waitstaff.

I find it strange that there were almost as many staff as customers in the restaurant but somehow they were so busy that they couldn’t even talk to each table to take the next orders. Are they restocking the supplies room? Working on construction? Maybe some are in the backroom negotiating the building insurance quote over the phone, in between each trip taking orders from customers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ They were also constantly running out of supplies.

My takeaway from this whole ordeal is that when we are dipping meat in water, meat is gonna taste roughly the same whether it’s a $30 place or a $60 place. We’ll go to a $30 place next time.