Tong Yang, SM CDO Downtown — Restaurant in Cagayan de Oro

When it comes to quantity of food, there is plenty of them in this restaurant, cooked or ready to cook ingredients. Both have some caveats in them. The cooked food are mostly asian fusion theme, though mostly filipino and chinese. Rice, mostly served as fried rice, are ok but sometimes its hard or even crunchy in some cases. Soup were ok but sometimes much salty than I would expect. Plenty of dishes to choose from, fish chicken, sotanghon, vegetable, and many more but they are mostly salty or bland, with little aroma, texture, or essence which I sadly find mediocre. Their best cooked food which you can readily eat are the siumai. They smell good and taste great but they also quickly ran out and the restaurant has difficulty refilling these suimai. The other also good would be the (japanese) maki, they are good but not as large or as good as those from the japanese restaurant. For the ready to cook meal, there most readily and abundantly available would be vegetable, prepared noodles, fish ball, shrimp balls, tofu, fish heads, fish belly, cut chickens, and even internal organs like chicken and pork liver - there are grills and cooking pots on every table so you can choose how you will prepare them. Their best bet would be the pork and beef cuts which taste really good when mixed with soy sauce, or teryaki sauce when grilled or they can be mixed and cooked in the pot with other ingredients to make noodle soup. However, the pork and beef are not easily available - they are popular and easily depleted. Shrimps and crabs are occasionally available and in my experience, i only encounter them once and that was before the pandemic began in 2020. Overall, cooking ready to cook food will also depends on the consumer cooking skills and its fine for me, i am quite an amateur in cooking and i enjoy cooking here as well as i could appreciate my output and enjoy my meals. There is a sauce rack at the corner of the center isle so use it freely and spice up the flavor. There are drinks available: a soda dispenser, the ice tea dispenser, the coffee maker, and a flavored water dispenser. Unfortunately only the coffee maker, and the flavored water dispenser proved consistently reliable and available. The ice tea is also dispense in the water dispenser but ice tea is alsona popular drink so exoect it will be depleted quickly. The soda dispenser broke down very often and that may be because consumers were very rough with it. There used to be a beer draft but ceased working before 2020 and was not back in service (it is still physically there and stood like a decoration).

As for the deserts, this is their strong points, you can get some short cakes, ice creams, fruits, or make halo-halo. Services are ok here but like most restaurant, understaffing is an issue. Sometimes servers are too busy when the house is full. I suggest you dine during non-peak days like lunch during the weekdays to have the best experience in meals when not too many people are in the place and the servers not overburdened with so many...

I had my post celebration birthday there today and missed the free offer but it was fine. There are variety of foods, from cook to uncooked ones. For cook ones I suggest getting the mapo tofu, others are not that remarkable. I suggest if you're going to be talking while eating, don't grill foods and just get the shabu shabu instead. I like how they have noodles as well but no mushrooms. They have seafood and I suggest getting the korean fish slices. It was tender and has a bit of sweetness. For dipping sauce, the sichuan was delicious.

Just don't like the customer service, for the price it was not worth it. We were just put on the table without any word from him, not even asking where we prefer to sit. No explaination about the buffet or the shabu shabu. There was even a missing shabu shabu cooker as they only put 2 even though we were 3 people in the table. My friend did not want to argue and just let it be.

When we were getting some ice cream, I could not for the life of me see any teaspoons. So I asked the person who scooped and just told us they were washing it so just get a normal spoon from a server. It took 3 servers for us to get a spoon for my now "milk" cream and I saw he just took it from another table placement without people, I could have just done that then.

They also have limited drinks albeit delicious, they don't have sodas aside from root beer.

When I was paying it was a hassle, I have gone to the counter and was told by the lady to get my bill to the person behind the pillar and then go back to the same counter to pay. With the 5% service charge additional to the 738 per pax, I would expect a bit better service.

Would not recommend and would not go back again even if it was just a single time...

Not worth coming here if you pay for the full price. I expected a lot from Tong Yang considering how expensive the rate is per person, but they seem to prioritize quantity over quality. For the sake of having "many options" to choose from, most of the food ended up not turning out good.

The cakes tasted dry, and the icing has sort of a "gummy" consistency and wasn't great altogether. I expected their sushi would feel a bit more authentic, but it wasn't any different from cheap sushi you'd find at a supermarket. It mostly contained imitation crab, or pieces of tempura.

I wasn't a fan of how their soy sauce tasted either. Eating the sushi itself felt a bit too plain, and if anything, it felt like you'd taste the rice more.

Their tempura, although I got them as soon as they restocked their trays, I assume would be fresh, but they ended up being not only room temperature, but full of mostly breading, with the tiniest bit of shrimp inside, and was hard to chew. It did not feel crispy at all.

The highlight of the buffet was probably their unlimited ice cream, which were from huge tubs of Selecta (which you can opt to buy outside of the restaurant).

Their drinks also tasted too watered down, and there were barely any soda options. I remembered there only being 1 bottle of regular Coke left out. It would be better if they had options for zero-sugar drinks as well when it comes to soft drinks.

Would only recommend coming here if you're very hungry and not too picky about the...