Tao @ e-Gate

Planned a dinner with didi on a Thursday and the location was his pick since we agreed that it was going to be my treat - and he wanted to do Tao - so off we went for the earlier session which entitled us to 10% discount (yeah lah, call me cheapskate :P )

For those new to Tao, it is actually a Japanese-fusion restaurant which offers ala-carte style buffet - meaning it's an 'eat-all-you-can' affair, with the only difference being that we can order the items from the menu (unlimited number). Food items vary from Japanese to Chinese, Korean, Western, etc.


Why on a Thursday? Coz this fella's off shift and I was off work at 3pm, and the initial time he wanted to pick me up was actually at 5:30pm but I was late again :P seems that he's pretty particular with time and is always punctual (earlier in real fact)


In the end, we reached Tao at 6pm! :O


One thing I didn't like about this particular Tao is that the moment we were seated, the waiter actually reminded us the cost of the buffet dinner (which is about RM50++) and he just HAD TO mention "no food wastage, every 100gm will be charged RM 5" - and not just ONCE, but TWICE! (second time was when he asked what drinks we'd like) and it just made me feel as though he felt that we would definitely waste food?!


Whatever.. Am not going to let the waiter spoil our dinner, so we started to browse through the menu to see what to order..

We picked some of our favourites first:-

Didi's recommendation : forgot what's the name of this fish - he said it's freakin' good


Turns out that the fish wasn't so fabulous afterall - even to didi's standards but we had to chow it down since 'every 100gms of food wasted will be charged RM 5'

.................but after a while of thinking about what other items we could have missed, we actually got 'creative' and mischievious and started to think of some ideas on how to 'hide' all these food we couldn't finish, e.g. ordering a miso soup - drink half then hide it inside the soup; order a tempura where they'll serve the soup dip and hide it inside.. or hide it within the tempura basket :P (no, we did none of the above coz didi eventually finished the whole fish graciously :D

Stir-fried beef strips


Of all the dishes that we ordered, this could very well be the best

Scallops


But I still liked the scallops no less - come on! They're scallops! What's NOT to like about scallops? Didi said he didn't like the sauce

Grilled lamb


Stir-fried squid


Oh and did I mention that the drinks SUCKED big time? There were 4 choices.. orange, peach, green tea, blackcurrent (didi could memorize this pretty well by the time we asked the waiter twice :P ) All of the drinks tasted one kind and overly sweet - yucks! But we still had to endure it otherwise we would've thirsted through the whole buffet


Second round... we had Salmon with papaya - anything weird's definitely his order - and it tasted surprisingly good though I didn't quite like the texture of it being mushy and all


My all-time-favourite Tempura (mixed with vegetables)


Mixed Sashimi.. where only the salmon and tuna's nice - I didn't like the tuna so didi finished them off

I ordered this... (forgot what it's called)


it's filled with cheese and he only had one since he's not lactose tolerant (I didn't know that until I ordered this)

Deep-fried mantis prawn


this was not nice at all - very dry and salty

Salmon sushi


the rice was too heavy in portion, too hard and dry as well - only the salmon was good, but then again, we can't forego the rice because........ 'every 100gms of food wasted will be charged RM 5'

And you'd think that after all those food that we stuff ourselves with, we'd call it an evening? Nooo... didi spotted some soup concoction thingy that another table ordered and was fascinated with it that he took the menu to look for the item... :S


He couldn't find it and so he asked the waitress and was told that's the Kimchi soup... he asked if I'm ok with it.. as I was very doubtful how the Kimchi soup will turn out, I was pretty reluctant but said OK anyway under the condition that he'd have to finish it if the soup's no good :P .............

After a Loooooooooooong wait later.... the Kimchi soup came and one glance at it and I could almost immediately tell that it ain't good :(


And a sip of the soup confirmed that (-.-)"

Then the weirdest thing happened.... As I was yacking away while slowly consuming the contents of the soup, I saw didi munching down all the vegetables and the soup, one round after another until the whole claypot was empty! :O

And shockingly enough, he remarked 'the soup didn't taste that bad afterall actually' *faint*

Dessert time! We had both of the dessert choices given to us

Pistachio ice cream (they ran out of green tea flavour)


Watermelon


As I don't normally take watermelon, I took the ice cream and it tasted just like toothpaste urghh~

In the end, didi sneaked away from the table and settled the bill - Thanks for the sweet gesture! But don't ever do that again especially when I said it's my treat


In all - we both agreed that we're not going back to Tao for a while, for obvious reasons that it's not worth the price and the food had degraded in quality as well