Volcano Japanese — Restaurant in Wales

We went here as my daughter was desperate to go for her 14th birthday. It is supposed to be all you can eat, however this is not exactly as it seems.

You pay £28.99 (£25.99 during the week), this applies to everyone over 140cm. For this you are entitled to 20 small dishes. You are given a paper menu and a pen and you chose 4 dishes every 20 minutes. Now I know that it takes the average human approximately 20 minutes to have food reach their stomach, so you are starting to feel the effect of the food before you have even ordered your second round, even though the portions are tiny (one of my dishes consisted of two mushrooms).

The child in our group only managed 4 small dishes (one course), but we still had to pay £28.99 for her. We had considered the alacarte menu, but it came to £22 for two small dishes, so we were over a barrel. We also discovered that she was 142cm (they measured her) so didn't qualify as a half price child.

The drinks were extortionate, £3.20 for small glass bottles of coke and sprite, and mine and my husband's lime and soda water cost an eye watering £4 (£1 for a shot of lime cordial and £3 for soda water). It was a new record £8 for two, half pints of lime and soda!!!

There was a lot of waiting around, we were in the restaurant for 3 hours and 15 minutes. Service was so slow, even though the restaurant was quite. They take your order and the food comes within 5-10 minutes, but then you wait between 20-30 minutes for them to come back and take your order for the next round. There is no way we could have done anything to speed up this process, that's how the "all you can eat" offer works, we just spent a lot of time, sitting and waiting.

My husband and I are vegetarian, we only came here because our daughter was desperate to. I was pleased to see plenty of vegetarian options available, however was surprised to find that there is no difference in the price for the vegetarian options, so my cucumber maki cost the same as the salmon/tuna and my two mushrooms cost the same as the steak.

The food was ok, there was nothing special about it but it seemed fresh, hot food came out sizzling and tasted ok.

There was an ice cream bar, no one told us about this, we only knew it was there because we were sat next to it and saw other people get up to use it. We had to ask (as we were paying our bill) if it was available to us.

Over all we had a disappointing and expensive evening. The service was slow and disjointed, we were there a good hour and a half longer than we would have wanted to be, but this was purely because of how long it takes for you to go through the motions of their ordering system.

There were seven of us, four adults, two teens and one child, no one was drinking alcohol, only one person ate all five courses, but our bill came to over £250 for a meal I would have said was worth no more that £150.

So while this is an "all you can eat", I feel it is designed in a way that you will never get value for money (not even including the over inflated cost of drinks) and the ordering system makes this a experience overly complicated and over all very disappointing. We would...

We LOVED our experience, it was like an episode of kitchen nightmares during our 4+ hour stay which provided us with lots of entertainment. Firstly - the food itself is good and the buffet is okay for value if you have a large enough appetite. It’s not a true all you can eat buffet though, but we were full after our 4th round. you get a max 5 rounds containing up to 4 dishes each. Be warned, this experience will test you; you need to be patient waiting for your food and able to plan your appetite over the course of the next few hours in order to avoid the dreaded malicious food wastage charge. Our first test was having our order taken, we were left waiting for 50 minutes after receiving drinks to order food, when we were able to successfully get the attention of a waitress we were then given QR codes to order from an app instead, despite us not ordering the drinks in this way and given menus to fill out our orders. You must set a timer 20 minutes after each round of food is ordered so you can order your next; please note they will not arrive in order. Some of our table (4 total) were left waiting longer and were envious, sadly you cannot switch food as this was a chargeable offence. We were starving, but little did we know, gluttony would soon get the better of us. The missing dishes from our early rounds started to show up in the last 30 minutes of our visit but we were near capacity, the risk of £2 per sushi dish and £3 per hot dish malicious food waste charge was looming. Please note; it’s not possible to simply wait until you’re received all your last round before ordering again as we would have likely waited an hour plus for anything to arrive (there is a 2 hour limit for ordering). Thankfully, we were able to successfully eat all our dishes and avoid the wastage charge (you are not able to take this home for later). During our 4+ hour experience, I would confidently say that not a single table would have tipped. Many walked out and even handled their drinks back due to the wait, customers coming in for a table were being seated despite the kitchen clearly being overwhelmed, Every 20 minutes or so another customer would come up to the bar who has been left hungry and ignored by wait staff. I watched every persons face leave the restaurant with a grimace due to the ordeal (including staff). I haven’t seen that many angry dads in a long time. Lastly - the tap water charge in the T&C’s. It’s £1 per glass for this, which is actually illegal to do in the UK if you serve alcohol under the licensing act. However, when we went to the bar to pay, it wasn’t on our tab so I guess one of the angry dads had already raised this earlier that evening. Overall, it was a great experience for us as we were able to still enjoy the food but you need to write off the rest of your evening for this. The T&C’s are wild so definitely have a read over before ordering. The restaurant needs to reduce its menu size and capacity for seating + wait staff need to just explain how ordering works fully and make people aware of...

I was very excited with these restaurant as I am a very big fan of Japanese food. My first go was an a la carte they offer. It was great. The quality of the preparation was above average.

However, my dissapointment came on my second visit as the quality really dropped on their eat-all-you-can service. The quality of the sushi and maki have not met our expectation. It was very poorly executed. It feels rushed and can't feel enough care put into it.

Furthermore, I visited again for the third time, this time with my family and it became worse. Customers are entitled to 5 rounds of orders in a time limit of 2 hours in their eat all you can offer. By the time we got to our third round, we can feel that they are not too keen on taking our orders anymore. It took some time before we were attended to. What made it worse was they asked if we were sure that we would like to order some more only on our 3rd round. The waiter seems not happy basing on his reaction. I was a major put off. Totally dissapointing and will make you think of coming back again. For the price they are charging, food and service wasn't great at all.

Hope you improved on your service in the future. A bit of warmth of on how you deal with your customers would be a big help. Service of staff and quality of food has...