King’s Shabu Shabu

Honestly if I didn’t get food poisoning from this place it probably would have gotten two stars. We decided to eat here because the groupon special seemed like a decent deal. For four people it ended up being around $ 130.
The place looked pretty cool from outside, but that illusion died as we stepped in. The inside was kind of depressing, especially the refrigerators where you get the noodles and vegetables. I had to question if some of the stuff there was alive or not.
The sauces looked like they had been sitting out for a while and not changed regularly. The only saving grace was the service, but that alone wouldn’t be enough to make me go back.

My first impression of this place was «Wow, they have a lot of tables!» They are pretty friendly here making sure that you know what the different flavor profiles from each broth is like.
The miso soup already comes with some tofu, so that is an added bonus. The one thing that could be improved is that it can have more of a miso flavor. The one that we had was really watery.
The meats are pretty tasty, but not worth the cost on the menu. There are other shabu shabu places that offer just as good meat cuts at a lower price or will give you way more.
The sauce area was well stocked and not messy at all. So presentation was a positive. Although there were a ton of small tiny flies all over the place. That was a big negative on my appetite.

Wouldn’t go there with no groupon voucher. Don’t have too high of expectation as their menu is changed to less food, soup was little taste and limited choices. Go to somewhere else if you looking for some hotpot.

Super nice waitress. When we told her we were clueless, she went out of her way to show us the ropes. She even made a fabulous sauce at their sauce bar for us. Yum! We had tom yum broth & got to choose our add in ala carte. Taro, fish cake, pork meatballs & mochi were great in the broth. That sauce she made was like crack. I had to put it on everything! If she bottled it, she’d be a millionaire! Can’t wait to return.
Didn’t get any shave ice at the end. Guess they don’t do that anymore.

Fake replica of what hot pot should be. Visited this spot a couple times before and it was great! I even recommended them to many people. Unfortunately ownership definitely has changed because it’s not nearly the same.
First off, we ordered the Tom yum broth because they only had ¹⁄₃ of the choices they had before. The Tom yum broth seemed wrong as it was like spicy water that tasted more sour than hot and we found ourselves picking lemon wedges and seeds out of the broth throughout our meal. When getting our veggies from the reach-​in coolers we also saw on the very bottom some tubs of instant shabu shabu beef broth you buy at Don Quijote. While thinking we were smart for not getting the beef broth, in hindsight that instant broth might have been better than the Tom yum wanna-​broth.
The coolers were bare with slim selections and the udon noodles were still in the plastic wrapping, frozen! Give me a break! At least try to make it look like a real restaurant.
Anyway, as our main selections we ordered beef tongue, pork belly, and the ribeye because they were out of the wagyu. They were all good, but I really don’t think you can mess up sliced raw meat. Another thing that you would think wouldn’t be hard to mess up is rice, but to our surprise it was our biggest disappointment. It was frozen rice, microwaved!!! Seriously!!! I asked the server and she even confirmed! Give me a break! It wasn’t even edible. The top of the bowl contained soft grains that broke apart and the bottom of the bowl was one clumped rice ball that was dry and hard. Seriously it was obvious that they sprinkled some water on the top and tossed it in the microwave.
Is this a restaurant or a college dorm room? Seems that they have issues keeping up with the overhead of the restaurant as it is large place that was completely empty at 630 pm, but why cheat your guests out of food quality? Using frozen rice, instant broth, frozen packaged noodles, and absolutely no level of restaurant standards is a poor choice to sacrifice when this meal was $ 70! Either they are scooping on the profit or they are really bad at business because we will never go back and will be letting everyone know about our Not-​So-​Hot-​Pot experience!

My boyfriend and I decided to try this place out because of the deal that they had on Groupon: $ 15 for $ 25 worth of food, doesn’t sound bad right? We’ve never had this kind of food before, and I looked through the pictures of food on Unilocal,so we decided to give it a shot. The food was good and it gave us a good first impression on what shabu shabu is. The service was okay… the waitress checked on us only when I would look at her and she mainly paid attention to the couple next to us. My boyfriend didn’t care for the food much… I mean, we thought it was good but my boyfriend thought that we had better food elsewhere. I just mainly wanted to go for the experience. BUT, PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING! YOU WANT TO KNOW THIS BEFORE YOU EVEN THINK OF VISITING THIS PLACE:
PRICE: EXPENSIVE! Thank goodness for Groupon or else I would’ve had to pay $ 52 for 2 people! I honestly didn’t think that I was going to spend $ 27 (including groupon). And I didn’t think it was worth that much. Like I said, food was good but not fantastic.
WAITRESS: She was nice but her service was okay. She should’ve been on top of her game since there were only 4 of us. I was a server and had to serve 20 people and even I was on top of my game. BUT THE FOLLOWING IS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW. Unfortunately, because I didn’t expect to spend that much, I couldn’t tip her. (I do feel bad for being stingy cause I was a server and I know what it’s like to not get tipped, but hey, there’s nothing a server can do about that.) So she stops us at the door and asks how her service was. We said that it was good… then she said that the tip wasn’t included… then I said, I know… then she said «if the service was good, then why you no tip?» I didn’t say much and then she says with an attitude, «Oh, so you don’t tip even if the service was good?» And when I apologized for not tipping her, she snobbed us and walked away. I called back asking for a manager and she claims that she is the manager. And when I told her about my background and how I thought that she was unprofessional, she started arguing with me!
Here’s the thing, I served food that costs WAY more than what we ate tonight and sometimes I didn’t go home with anything! I still didn’t go up to anyone and imposed on a tip. She kept arguing with me saying that she was asking about the service when it wasn’t exactly like that. She still brought up the tip! I hope she knows that what she’s doing is illegal. That’s called «soliciting tips.» Just as long as we paid the bill, we are free to go. My dad was angry and called and said that what she was doing was illegal and argued with her and she decided to give us 50% off on our next meal. But we are so upset, so we will not be returning even if the meal was free. I see lots of poor ratings on here so I hope King’s Shabu Shabu gets their things together.

Worst shabu shabu restaurant on this island. We originally went there based on pics of the menu that were posted. Come to find out they had changed their menu ever since. Minimal choices for shabu shabu & they decided to expand on serving regular Chinese food instead. We had the spicy broth. Terrible. Bland. Tasted like water mixed with chili peppers. Not much choices for vegetables nor any of the other sides as well. The Chinese lady stands there like a hawk!!! Beware… They also forgot to bring are order of meat & didn’t offer us rice.

Why does the outside of this place smell like a ton of fishes died in the parking lot?
It should’ve been a warning of death to your wallet. I went here with just my boyfriend because I had a groupon and I love hot pot. The place is nice indoors, not to mention empty. It was just us and one other party of 3 drunken older men. We got a spicy broth which was OK and our usual spread of veggies and meat. The portions of the veggies are smaller than what I’m used to seeing at most hot pot places. The meat portion was pretty standard. We pretty much ordered the same amount of items that we usually order at other hot pot places. BUT the only difference is the bill. I’m not some crazy miser type of person, I’ll dish out on amazing food anyday but really? We had a groupon and our bill came out to almost 70 something bucks! so with the groupon we roughly owed like $ 40… thank god for the groupon preview but I doubt I’ll be back. To top it off, I found it super hilarious that we were the only people dining there by the end of our meal so you’d think the service would be spot on but when I needed a spoon for the sauce bar I had to wait then search for the waitress, and when I wanted the check the waitress was at cashier which is near the entrance & blocked by a small partition facing away from the seating area. How are you suppose to see if anyone needs your service? So, I had to walk up to you to get your attention and the check, but at least you came back to get the payment…
2 stars for the decent set-​up & sauce bar. And overall the waitress was nice…

I was optimistic about this place, I really was.
I stumbled upon this place thanks to good ol groupon. I looked past a lot of the 1 and 2 starred reviews and thought eh, why not? College girl trying to save money here. Can’t be THAT bad right?
I should’ve smelt the bad once my friend and I opened the doors…
Kings shabu shabu, from what I remember was an actual Chinese restaurant. And it still very well may be with all the beige plastic chopsticks and the chips and juice for sale at the entrance.
It’s located right behind the KFC that’s on Beretania street. With Pretty ample parking, my friend and I get there at 7:30 p. m to eat dinner.
**Ok, some people had problems with the groupon, so I made sure to call and the girl seemed confused as to why I asked that, but they did honor it.**
We walk in and it’s so empty for a Friday night. Just us, another family celebrating a birthday and a couple (which turned out to be the mandarin family eating their dinner.)
The girl, who’s the only waitstaff is kind of rushy (and fidgety) takes our order quickly. We decide on a split of tom yung soup (sp?) and mushroom ($ 2 extra for split) 1 order beef tongue and 1 steak.
She is gone for a good 15 minutes and we start to wonder.
She finally comes with the soup, Which the pot is pretty big and says the meat is coming out shortly and leaves. We take a sip: tom yung is decent, not full bodied like a Thai soul but decent. The mushroom was pretty basic and one dimensional tasting.
We figure hey, why not get our sides? We walk to the sliding fridge and start picking some things (their selection is ok: mushrooms of sorts, gau gee, meat balls, Choy sum, noodles, seafood) when all of a sudden she rushes to us and starts grabbing our plates and says something. I apologised, as we didn’t know it was a policy to not grab our own, but it just seemed like a time for her to push the sides…“sweet potato noodles are good, you like gau gee?“
We get back to the table and realise we need rice! Ok, no waitress… in 10 – 15 minutes she appears and again we ask about our mystery meats.
«Almost coming. Thank you.»
We get our sauces – which are ok (they have a special shoyu, ginger, garlic, scallions, red vinegar, chilli sauces and oyster sauce)– but the containers that hold them are deep and empty so it was sad trying to scrape the remaining sauces.
I think by minute 40 we get our meat. It looked fresh, maybe it took so long because they slaughter in-house??Or just ran out and made a store run, I don’t know, but for the price of it, the amount is pretty hefty. They didn’t have steak so we got ribeye for the same price, which was nice.
We asked for soup spoons and never got it. Coming from a Chinese family, I know we don’t use spoons, we just bring the bowl to our mouths and scoop stuff via chopstick, but this is America, it’d be nice to get a spoon for soup, especially when asked.
We finish and get the complementary shave ice – mango, strawberry and melona fruit like compote – it was ok as well.
Our bill was $ 52 and all I have to say is thank god we had the Groupon.
Even though it was clean, spacious and large meat portions, for the service, including wait time (about a 2 hour dinner) and overall food, it’s not worth the price.
Sorry but I’m not sorry, I don’t think I’ll be back.

King’s Shabu Shabu.
We went on a whim, lots of parking, blinking «Open» sign so why not take a chance. Chinese shabu shabu/​hot pots sounds fun! It turned out to be just another reason why I should ALWAYS check the Unilocal reviews before trying a new restaurant.
Granted we went early (11:15am) for lunch, but we were the only customers for the first half-​hour — a bad omen of things to come. After eating at best mediocre shabu shabu:
— Bland Beef Bone Soup broth which was recommended to us by our host as very popular.
— Like most hot pot places I like how you could self-​sever what ingredients you wanted in your hot pot via a color coded plate system: $ 4.99 for red plates, $ 3.99 for blue, etc. and control the temperature of your hot pot via remote control!
— Dry and slimy brown parsley at their condiment bar.
— We had to ask for rice and spoons so that we could start eating.
— Lobster balls that tasted artificial and fake.
— Our server being in HUGE need of breath mints. It’s hard to enjoy a meal with the after smell of hauna breath wafting through the air.
— The free shaved ice at the end was nice. Nothing like Sweet Home Café’s, but it was nice none the less.
Top it all off with a $ 45 bill for two and I say don’t bother.
I told myself no way will this place survive and then it happened… two busloads of Chinese tourist were shipped in and the place was suddenly jumping! They looked like they were enjoying themselves, but locals beware. Sweet Home Café and Hot Pot Heaven (both only a few blocks away) are light years ahead.

My actual score is a 4.5 stars out of 5, but since I’m generous, King’s Shabu Shabu, you earned a Perfect 5 stars out of 5 from me. Congratulations.
Here’s what I like about your restaurant:
1. The table-​top cooking shabu shabu. You gave us a pot of 2 different types of STANDARD broth (chicken broth for «turf» & seafood broth for «surf»). You gave us the tour of your sauce station & produce station to enhance the broths. VERY HEALTHY too!!!
2. Large variety of sauces, meats, and produce to help enhanced the shabu shabu to our liking. Well done.
3. Restaurant environment, dining room is spacious, neat, and nice from the inside. Makes it kinda intimate. Outside the restaurant kinda looks like a submarine which is kinda cute.
4. Your signature dessert: Shave Ice. Excellent quality tasting. HEALTHY too!!! A better substitute to ice cream.
Here are my suggestions to further enhanced your restaurant:
1. For the sauce station, possibly include Vietnamese sauces like Fish Sauce to the choice.
2. For the meats/​seafood station, if you can include raw calamari or octopus, that’ll be cool.
3. For the shabu shabu, you can also include traditional Vietnamese style shabu shabu which involves giving us an option of serving rice paper and verminelli.
I’ll be definitely coming back next time. I heard you have lobster too. I hope your lobster is way better than your rivals (i.e. Lobster King, Fook Yuen, etc…); surprise me LOL.
Again, you got my vote of a Perfect 5 stars out of 5. Keep it up King’s Shabu Shabu. Best wishes to your business.

Be prepared if u haven’t been to a place like this. Not a fast eat restaurant.
I’m not a pro at these kind of restaurants though, but I don’t think the price is fitting.
I wouldn’t come back but I think its just because the type of food we had. Maybe I need to go with a pro on this type of stuff.
The service was good and I LOVED their sauce station. That’s where the four stars come in

This is a review for the $ 6 lunch buffet… and yes, of course I was skeptical when my mom was so eager to check it out. That’s a Chinese mom for you. I warned her that it’s probably too good to be true — a buffet for $ 6? But in the end we said, «if it’s junk, then not a huge loss.»
LOCATION
On McCully right behind KFC, across from Dash, also across Torae Torae. Pretty good location with lots of parking. We were hopeful when we drove up because the parking lot was pretty filled. A man was smoking at the entrance and opened the door for us as we entered, and sure enough it was one of the workers. Not professional at all and already left a bad first impression. At least smoke on the side or somewhere not so visible to customers…
ATMOSPHERE
Well…I have no explanation for why the parking lot was filled lol. It was empty inside, except for two groups inside. I guess that was enough hope for us to dine in. The buffet table is on the left, and there are cafeteria style plates. The tables looked clean and most of the chairs had brand new chair covers on, and the waitress was nice enough to give the table one more wipe down before we sat. There was weird music playing, I’m not sure if it was their own playlist but it was the most random playlist ever lol. Chinese pop songs, to sad sounding blues songs that made me feel like I was in a prison LOL.
FOOD
The food looked OK when we previewed it before deciding to dine in. All the standard fare was there, like chow fun, oyster sauce chicken, beef broccoli, etc. but no seafood. Everything was bland. I have to admit it was probably one of the worst Chinese food I’ve had in my life. But what were we to expect from a $ 6 buffet, we definitely got what we paid for lol. My mom and I agreed that we won’t be back again.
SERVICE
There’s not much of it, besides water being filled once. When we were finished and wanted to pay, the only waitress there was outside smoking with the other man mentioned earlier (probably the cook), right in front of the entrance again. We had to wait for her to finish her smoke break.

So King’s Shabu Shabu opened an AYCE Chinese buffet. The buffet is currently running a grand opening special with lunch for $ 6 and dinner for $ 8 – AYCE. The hubs and I decided to try it out today, and it was a decent buffet. All the normal Chinese fair, including chow mein, chow fun, fried rice, chicken, char siu, pork chop, mabo tofu, egg drop soup, chinese eggplant, various stir fry’s, crispy won ton, egg roll, fried scallops (i think) and a bunch of other stuff.
The cafeteria style set up is in the same building as King’s Shabu Shabu, but It looks like 2 separate restaurants. It got pretty crowded today, and I’m sure that has something to do with the Grand opening special. For $ 6, it was a bargain, but I would recommend going early for lunch, as the food sitting out for too long will dry up. The one thing that would’ve been nice is music playing somewhere in the background. It was so quiet we could hear everyone’s conversations in the restaurant.
Parking tip: Reverse park in, so you can easily pull out of the stall. The parking lot is small and tight, so park so you can just drive right out.

We tried this place because I bought a Groupon… $ 40.00 vouher for $ 22.00. My coworker said he tried this place and likes the broths. We made a reservation for 5:30pm on a Friday since I work in the area we got there around 5:15pm. The place was deserted except for a party of two. We were sat and the server handed us the menus, we went with the shabu shabu/​hot pot option. We had the Tom Yum Sok (not even sure if thats correct) broth & Mushroom combination. We ordered the ribeye as our meat and decided to head for the freezers. They have a wide array of options in the freezer, definitely a lot of odd items such as goose belly, chicken intestines, and salmon head. We opted for the traditional fish balls, tofu, won ton, udon, etc. The broths were good, I wish the mushroom broth had a little more flavor to it but I guess thats why they have dipping sauce. They also have a wide array of dipping sauces. Service was not all that great as we had to ask for rice, napkins, water and clean serving spoons. Overall it was okay. Thank goodness I had that $ 40.00 Groupon voucher.

My dad purchased a groupon, so we ended up coming here one Friday night at about 6:30. Sadly (for the restaurant, but probably more awesome for us) there were only a couple other parties dining while we were here. Because the establishment is so large, it therefore looked pretty dead.
The theme for this restaurant is confusing. It is a Mandarin Chinese-​run restaurant and still has the On On décor feel. Its not a bad thing, it just kinda adds to the confusion a little. The menu offers both hot pot/​steamboat/​shabushabu options AND Cajun seafood. Confusing, right? Everyone in the restaurant at the time was eating shabushabu, which made me wonder how good their Cajun offerings are.
Like the many other shabushabu options in the area, you start by choosing a soup base. They have a pretty wide selection, but possibly a little pricier ($ 10.50 for just broth?!) I guess the broth was pretty good. I had the tom yum and tomato beef… They tasted pretty similar…
Apparently, you only have one chance to order meat as the waitress took the meat menu away right after we ordered. We were therefore left to get seafood, veggies, noodles and tofu/​bean curd options at the self serve fridges. Prices are similar to other shabu shabu places.
I liked the sauce offerings here. I like making my own ponzu, and this restaurant offers straight vinegar, which is essential in my ponzu making. Service was just okay. There is no shave ice dessert that comes with the meal, so we had to go somewhere else for dessert after our meal.

Semi disappointed with the service and quality of the food i would named it Jack’s Shabu Shabu or even lower in the card hands.
First of all while i was waiting for my friends to arrive and even when they arrived i never got the menu in front of me. As well as that we had to self serve our own water… they never asked what drinks we wanted so we just grab a few cups and served our-​self the whole time.
Food was ok and we wanted rice but they said they ran out and only had fried rice… i kept thinking to myself how long has that rice been sitting there if they had no rice. It was semi cold/​warm when we had it.
Also eventhough it was still 10pm the owner kinnda rushed us to pay and leave eventhough we were still eating and talking
Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah… not going to some here again thanks

The prices I read about here scared me away from trying King’s Shabu Shabu, but when I saw a deal on Groupon ($ 40 worth for $ 20), I decided to give them a try.
We got the hot pot and opted for the combination broth for $ 10.99. We chose Thai Tom Yum and Seafood for our two broths. The Tom Yum was tasty, but the Seafood lacked flavor. It did come with 1 shrimp, 1 mussel, and 2 clams, though.
We also ordered our meats from the server. It would help if the items you had to order from the server were listed in a separate place from the menu with prices rather than mixed in with all of the other items you pull from the fridge. Kobe Beef was $ 9.99, Ribeye was $ 7.99, Beef Tongue and Pork were $ 4.99. We opted for one Ribeye and one Beef Tongue.
I couldn’t help but keep track of how much we were spending as we picked our remaining items from the fridge. I really didn’t want to end up with a $ 100 bill, even with the Groupon. We also picked up a plate of Fish ($ 4.99), Lobster Balls ($ 3.99), Enoki Mushrooms ($ 3.99), Choi Sum ($ 2.99), and 2 bowls of Rice ($ 1.50×2). This brought us to $ 46.
Then we headed to the sauce station. There was a good variety of sauces and I was happy to see they had bowls rather than just tiny sauce dishes because I love mixing my sauces.
At the end of the meal, we were given a free shave ice for dessert.
The food tasted good, the service was okay but a little slow, the restaurant was nice and spacious, but I still feel like it was too pricey for hot pot. There are other hot pot restaurants that I would prefer going to. Glad I was able to try them out with the Groupon.
(Prices as of Jan 2014)

Jack of all trades, master of none. Cajun boil from Southeast Asian immigrants to the US South, Taiwanese hot pot with a Japanese name, Chinese chop suey style won tons and a Chinese language menu. It’s like an Asian food court.
Two major types of food: Cajun boil and Taiwanese hot pot (not shabu shabu).
1. Cajun boil — Similar to the other seafood boil joints; combos or by the pound, choose a heat level, done. Flavorful, messy to eat but average quality. No standouts. Avoid the «cajun» fries unless you’re into processed, previously frozen, crinkle cuts. Also, Volcanic is HOT. Guys, wash your hands well before using the restroom; just sayin.
2. Taiwanese hot pot — Choose the broth, ingredients, sauces, cook and eat. Broths are very basic. Spicy is mildly hot, the seafood and chicken both taste like basic stocks with MSG. Some very unusual ingredients to choose from; the geoduck, frog legs, and conch work really well together. Add live abalone, clams and lobster, and ama ebi (be sure to throw the heads in the broth), reasonably fresh veg and springy mushrooms and it’s one great pot!
Major pet peeve: Stop calling it Kobe beef if its NOT from Kobe Japan. USDA prime maybe. Definitely not the beautiful, shimmering, marbled with evenly distributed specs of unctuous fat throughout, rendering it light pink. Ahhh… Oops.
OK service. Prices in line with similar places.
Note: Current groupon (Dec 2013) makes it a great deal.

We came here for the cajun boil and not for the shabu shabu. They open at 5 for dinner and we got there around 4:55. The place was empty. I didn’t even see any workers. They finally opened a little after 5 and it was sort of a disarray. Since the place was empty, we just sat ourselves at a table. The waiter brought the water and menus a few minutes later. Things weren’t looking so good. Luckily it went uphill from there.
The staff was really friendly. They came by a few times to see how everything was going and to refill the water. The manager came by to chat and gave us coupons for the next meal. This week was their grand opening so they were already offering 20% off for dinner and free shave ice.
The hubby doesn’t like seafood so he got the chicken wings and cajun fries. He said that they were ok and the fries were really crispy. Instead of doing the whole seafood in a bag, I decided to order a la carte because I don’t really care for crawfish and mussels. I ordered a lobster, shrimp and clams; all mild in garlic butter sauce. It was so good I finished off the sauce with a bowl rice. I guess if you order a la carte, it comes on a plate instead of in a bag but it didn’t make a difference to me. The seafood was so fresh compared to other seafood places. Some of the other places, I could tell just reheated the seafood that was already cooked. I grew up eating seafood so I can tell if they cook it fresh by just cracking open the shell and by the texture of the meat. The shave ice was really good too.