Tokyo Grill & Buffet

It was ok. Service was nice. Some food was phenomenal, some was less than stellar (enter sushi.) Sushi guy was mean. Best hot and sour soup I’ve ever had. I’d pay just to sit there and eat nothing but that all day. Coconut shrimp was awesome. Octopus was overcooked and tough. Mac and cheese tasted sweet… couldn’t eat it. Overall, was average. I’d go back.

I love this place. I work close to it and love going for lunch. Great selection and I house 2 – 3 plates every time I go. Their sushi is awesome and the rest of the buffet includes hibachi, Chinese, some American, a salad bar and desserts.

I have enjoyed Tokyo grill and buffet for 3 months now. Mostly salad and salmon but the juicy roast beef and the sushi will keep me coming back. Every kind of shrimp dish, Bubba and Forrest Gump would be proud. Believe it or not with all that the people are relaxed, friendly and the waitresses are great too. I will try the hibachi grill made to order next.

Great place to eat, fantastic buffet bar and the hibachi was awesome. The price was right and I would highly recommend eating there

Great food and great service, they have ten tables of food to choose from and hibachi and sushi on top of that!

i love this place really good, really clean, not to expensive, and food taste great .come here all the time.

Dinner Buffett is only 9.99 $. It was very busy and food was coming out quite often. My waiter was pleasant and kept our waters filled consistently. They have a great variety of food options to choose from. I’m personally in love with the salt and pepper crabs, I just love the seasoning on them and they are quite meaty too. My only gripe with this place is the hibachi grill, this guy CAN NOT cook that well. My food is always burned and just doesn’t taste that great. I try to just stay close and alert him when it’s ready to my liking but yea. Doesn’t work that well. So now I just avoid it altogether. Otherwise it’s a good place to eat for a relatively low cost. It’s not the BEST Chinese style food but it’s filled with many options, low cost and quick.

My experience here with Tokyo Buffet has been all positive. Especially their selection of sushi available at this price point of restaurant. Yes, I’m sure there’s a bigger and better sushi buffet available in Charlotte. But one gets typically what they pay for and this is certainly a bargain.
The typical Chinese /​Asian food items were are just that — typical. Nothing outstanding, but certainly still good. Like many other reviews here, I did not try the American food items offered. Does not make sense to me to eat these while in a Oriental food place.

Good food and decent service. However, 10 minutes after leaving the restaurant my fiancée realized she forgot her fleece Columbia jacket in her chair. I called the restaurant back to please ask the waitress if she picked it up. I could hear the waitress acting like she didn’t know what a jacket was. Good food, but not really a fan of dishonest people. $ 10 tip and a new fleece Columbia jacket? She must be happy. Won’t be coming back

This is really a mixed restaurant with Japanese name but Chinese boss and Chinese waiters. Food is mostly Chinese and some American, Mexican. The only Japanese food might be the Sushi which is average level at most. Anyway this is really a cheap bufet and you can even get a discount if you bring a student ID with you

This shit looks Nasty. I will never ever eat at this place. I didn’t know Japanese restaurants serve pizza and Texas toast along with Mexican foods. smh

My friends (3) and I (which makes 4) decided to go here for their 350+ item buffet. Of course, since it’s Sunday, all of the local overweight «Christian”/church going ‘folks’ attend after their weekly worship, so there was a brief 10 – 15 minute wait.
Décor: It’s Asian-​esk with their Asian shrines, «KOI» pond, etc. The place has enough seating and was fairly well-​maintained.
Food: The food wasn’t actually bad for buffet. It was pretty good for it to be so many items. The seafood seemed fresh enough (there’s no really fresh seafood in Charlotte being that I’m from the DMV — land of blue crabs). The hibachi station has several options to choose from and they make it for you right on the spot, which is amazing! The American items I did not try because who wants Asian-​ized American food (I don’t), so I mainly stuck to the seafood and hibachi. I had about 2 – 3 plates, which was more than enough.
Service: It was pretty good, but they should ask if you’re done with your plate especially if it’s food still on it! I’m not too keen on wasting food.
Overall: I would go back for lunch, when it’s cheaper, but you can’t beat that broad of a food menu @ that low of a price.
Regards,
TrizzyO_​o

My friend and I stumbled upon Tokyo Grill & Buffet because another buffet restaurant that we were going to go to was closed for remodeling. We actually ended up here after searching for another one on Unilocal.Thank you fellow Unilocalies!
This place opened up in a strip mall that is close to UNCC next to Big Lots. If anyone has been in this strip lately they know that a lot of the businesses have moved out and it is looking a little rundown. Even as we pulled up, my friend and I kind of gave each other a look like «are we sure about this?» But do not let the outside discourage you!
This place is AWESOME! The buffet has everything you could ever want! There are Chinese, Japanese, and American options. They have sushi and hibachi stations. The buffet has tons of seafood options.
The price for the buffet is steal. It is only $ 6.99 for lunch and $ 9.99 for dinner. With all of the amazing options on the buffet it would be hard to leave this place and not feel like you got your money’s worth. In fact, you are going to leave this place feeling like you stole from them! That’s how good it is for such an amazing price!
Lots of businesses in the University area seem like they struggle to stay in business. My hope is that place will be able to survive.

This is a pretty decent buffet, as far as buffets go. They just opened, so the place is new and sparkling clean. It gets busy FAST, so make sure you come just before lunch/​dinner, or be prepared to wait a few, even with as many tables as they have.
The staff is pretty nice, and service is really good. They whisk away your old plates very quickly and courteously check in on you a lot.
There seem to be a lot of food options, but really only a few items for vegetarians. What they do have is pretty good. The food that I tried was decent and didn’t seem to be overly laden with sugar, salt, or MSG. The corn on the cob, however, seemed like it’d either been steamed for about 5 days, or it was really old corn. Ick.
People seemed to go nuts over the frog legs and the sushi. I recommend the broccoli dishes and the hot and sour soup. I’m so picky about my soup. This soup, with a ton of pepper added, probably is a ³⁄₅ in terms of restaurant soup. That’s more than 2 points over what I give the usual suspects. The egg rolls were pretty good. My companions said the crab was hit or miss.
I’m not big on buffets, but I hang out with people who are. I would definitely come here again.

This place could be a 4 star experience if you like sushi and catch them on the right day.
It has the usual grub (I call it grub because it is quantity of mediocre mainstream Chinese food), also the fried chicken, french fries, and pizza.
What makes this place stand out is that they have a decent variety of seafood, especially the sashimi and sushi. Warning: I have been twice and the quality and quantity of the sushi has varied immensely. On the weekend you can find sashimi if you are lucky — I never saw any sashimi during the lunch on a weekday.
I agree with the other review on Unilocal that your best bet is to buy sashimi by the pound and go home and make sushi. That is a bit too intense for most people but my real point is that this place doesn’t beat RuSan’s when it comes to sushi, but RuSan’s has no sashimi offered on the buffet. You also rarely get yellowtail at RuSan’s on the buffet. Here the yellowtail can very widely in quality — one day I went and it was awful. Another day I went and it was better than ok.
My review is so low for two reasons:
1) Inconsistency of quality of the food;
2) Inconsistency of availability of the food;
If you want to eat a lot of food and aren’t picky then this place is fine, but you probably just want the absolute cheapest place to go. I prefer the flavor of Indian buffet and mainly eat sushi at Chinese/​Japanese/​Random buffets.
I never tried the pizza and I never intend to. I did make a concession and try the garlic toast — ok flavor but mushy and gross on the inside and dried hard on the edges. It was cooked like a hot pocket: all wrong.

They have sashimi and nigiri style sushi. You can get salmon (sake), tuna (maguro), and yellowtail (hamachi) in either style. The bad news is that they are chronically slow at putting this food out, especially the sashimi. I put up a picture illustrating the problem, I visited the sashimi section twice over the course of 20 minutes and that picture represents what it looked like the entire time.
Another problem is that this is the worst yellowtail I have had anywhere in Charlotte. It is tough — a hybrid between eating a raw potato and eating actual yellowtail. The color and flavor are both off as well, the yellowtail is opaque and not a hint of pink. There are plenty of pieces with bright read streaks are far thicker than they should be because they are cutting the fish to maximize the volume and they overdo it. I suspect they are using leaner yellowtail caught in the US instead of the heavier fish raised in Japan.
With all those negatives you are in for a treat if you like salmon and you can find any. They don’t mess up he salmon, and the tuna is alright.
All the other items are typical of a Chinese/​Mongolian/​Japanese buffet (not the three separately, it is typical of any place that offers all three). You have the ubiquitous and over doughy dumplings and won-​ton, multiple varieties of heavily breaded and deep fat fried chicken (pepper, Tso’s, sesame), chicken wings, pizza, overcooked prime rib (calling it prime rib is misleading).
This place can probably pass for a 3 or 4 star when they have the good stuff on display but as is typical for these types of places they open strong and then reduce the quality hoping you will keep coming and strapping on the feedbag.
Tokyo Grill & Buffet suffers from the same problem as all its counterparts: it looks the same, it tastes the same, and the flavor /​quality is lower on any dish than if you ordered the individual dish at a normal restaurant.
I usually enjoy the variety of a buffet but at this buffet the food all tastes so similar that there is little variety. Unless you want to indiscriminately shovel food into your face I would skip this place. In the alternative you could buy 1lbs to go of the sashimi for $ 4.50 and stick to the salmon and tuna — this way you could make yourself a boat load of sushi at home for very cheap. I doubt they will keep letting people buy ‘sashimi’ grade sushi for $ 4.50/lbs so get it if they have it while they allow it.

Before I went to this place, i checked the reviews here and was thrilled and excited to find out the good reviews this place has gotten especially when most of the buffets around the charlotte area has been pretty low. When i got inside, the atmosphere was nice, the place looked clean and the host greeted my friend and I warmly. At this point, I was hyped as we walked to our table because of how good the food smelled like. The place at the time was pretty busy during lunch hour but nothing crazy. We were greeted by apparently our waiter (our own waiter at a buffet? wuuuuuuht) and then the moment arrived where we were allowed to eat and here is my review of this place.
Food: ⁴⁄₅
The selection of food was well over than what i expected it to be and I will say that most of what I had was still hot and decent tasting whereas in most places they’re cold (or maybe i was just lucky.) At the end of my meal, I don’t think i was able to try half or even a third of what was offered which is a plus. The sushi was pretty good, most of them were drizzled in sauces so you couldn’t really taste the fish at all. I hope in the near future they label their sushies on what it is because i couldn’t understand some of what the sushi chef said to me when I asked him what was in some of them. I did not have a chance to try out the hibachi sadly.
Service: ²⁄₅
Now the service is where it hit me the most. Looking around the place, it seemed to me like they had a lot of servers and workers which is a plus. But during my experience of about 40 – 50 minutes here, I was only able to receive 1 refill on my water. And for me, water (any drink in general) is really important especially in a buffet since most of the food is going to be salty. I’m not a super heavy water drinker who’ll chug my water in one gulp but i was out for a good 15 – 20 minutes before i got my only refill. And when my friend and I were done, we sat at our empty table for a good 15 minutes before we finally got our check. We saw our server stare at us a few times so we figured «Oh, he’s going to print out our tab this time around.» but it didn’t happen till we asked him.
Pricing: ⁵⁄₅
The tab for my friend and I came to a mere $ 15 for lunch buffet, nothing else to say there :) On our way out, i saw some books with coupons in them, so I’ll definitely be on the lookout for those, you too!
Overall experience:
I will be going here again, and I hope to raise my rating the next time around. All in all, the pricing is great especially for lunch time. food is good, and service, well, let’s just say I hope it’s better next time :).

We just ate here tonight. The sushi buffet was great with an ample selection of raw, cooked, and non-​fish rolls. The salad bar was great with mixed greens, eggs, fruit, etc. My favorite had to be the choice of various seafood dishes. I only wish there was a greater vegetable dish selection on the buffet – broccoli mix, green beans, and mushrooms only.
The dinner price is excellent and we will be back!

Wow wow wow
I’m sure $ 10 is an opening price because it’s so amazing. The food is incredible quality– the sushi by far is so good. I wish I had more to say but just GO here to eat and see.

I am blown away by this place–
Nothing like any other spot in the area. The food on the bars was fresh, which is a surprise in and of itself being a buffet, they have the normal fare for a chinese buffet with several japanese items as well, a decent American section too. I don’t eat buffet pizza, because I am a snob, but I have to say the pizza they offered actually looked tempting, which is a huge compliment from me.
Not only do they have the staples you expect (seseme and gen. Tso chicken, cheese wantons, egg and spring rolls, etc)
For i went for lunch on a tuesday (not a special day in my mind) and they had pot roast, ham roast, several fishes and more premium items, for no additional charge, as well as a sushi bar that rivals the better sushi buffet lunches in town, and a lovely hibachi.
All this for $ 7 at lunch, no drink. I feel like I robbed the place it was so cheap, i wouldve paid $ 10 for that lunch and still felt it was a superb deal.
I give four stars because thats the highest a non-​Vegas buffet gets from me, they are top tier at what they do.
Kudos!