All you can eat @ Yummy Chinese BBQ

Yummy Chinese BBQ in Acton offers all you can eat BBQ and steam boat / hot pot for $35 per person. This does not include drinks. There are 2 sittings – 5pm or 7pm. A 2 hour time limit for all you can eat goodness. We made a 7pm booking on Monday night. The place was PACKED both outside (outdoor heaters were on) and inside. Each table has a solid hanging exhaust to suck up BBQ smoke.

I didn’t actually know what to expect here. The three of us sat down and the owner came over and explained how to order. Giving us a tablet, she explained that we could order as many serves of items as we wanted from the tablet. The first serve ordered comes in lots of how ever many people are at the table. So entering a ‘1’ in the quantity section would produce 3 of that meat skewer (3 of us at the table). The subsequent times you use the tablet to order, entering a ‘1’ will only produce 1 of that meat skewer.

The tablet is mostly in Chinese. Enter in the quantities using the plus/minus signs and then try to get the attention of a staff member to do the rest. They then take the tablet away so you’ll need to find a staff member again if you want to order more meat skewers. In addition to the tablet food menu, there’s plenty of food laid out buffet style at one end of the restaurant. You have a raw meats section filled with marinated chicken wings, squid and more.

A cold ‘salad’ bar with tofu, spicy seaweed salad, shredded turnip etc.

Along another wall, sits a row of metal buffet pots filled with items such as spicy fish, crab, pippi’s, vegetables, frozen seafood mix (for the steam boat), broth, noodles and more. You can help yourself to as much as you want.

I really liked the spicy fish. I was a little scared to try this at first – I mean look at all those red peppers in the pot! But the fish was only mildly spicy and so soft. Cooked beautifully!

Udon noodles cook easily in the steam boat, and yes, that’s spam.

We decided on one of each of the four skewers available on the tablet to start off with. A staff member brought over hot coals to place in the middle ‘pit’ in the table. It took about 10 minutes for the raw meat skewers to be brought out. The metal skewers each have a cog on the end that can be placed in the metal trappings so you can turn the cog slightly to get an even cook/BBQ on each side of your skewer. Smart! There are only 11 slots for 11 skewers. Too bad it’s not an even number.

I liked the pork and pineapple skewers and lamb skewers the best.

A serve of beef was also ordered and this comes out frozen to be cooked in the hot pot.

Looking over at other tables, we noticed hot plates were being used to cook the chicken wings and squid, and cute hot pots bubbling away. We did not know where to find this and assumed it would be brought over to us, perhaps after we’d finished with the BBQ skewers. Utensils, napkins and water are all self serve. When this didn’t happen, we just asked a passing staff member. One hot pot is to be shared between two. A choice of either spicy or non-spicy broth is provided. Since there were three of us, we got two hot pots – one spicy and one non-spicy (for me). The pot is quite small – half the size of what it looks like in the photo as the bottom half is fitted with the charger (?) to heat the pot.

I loaded up my plate with udon noodles, seafood mix balls, veggies and other bits to put in the pot. It takes a while to start bubbling – a good 15 minutes with the lid on.

The non-spicy broth is peppery and didn’t have as much flavour as the spicy broth which had a stronger meatier flavour.

A hot plate was brought out for us after asking for one. You’ll need to make room for this and finish most of the meat skewers to fit it over the pit.

The dessert station has sweet sliced oranges and fried sesame balls. We missed out on the sesame balls (it was 9pm at this stage) but the oranges were still coming out.

It took a few minutes to figure out how everything worked. Some staff can’t speak or understand English that well but all have a friendly smile and bring out what you need in the end. Current English pop music is played over the speakers. It’s loud inside but not too loud that I couldn’t hear what was being said by my dining companions. At the end of dinner, you will stink of BBQ smoke so be prepared for that.

Yummy Chinese BBQ is located next door to Meet Fresh on Childers Lane in Acton and is open 5-10pm all week. Bookings essential!

Foodgasm 7.5/10