Mr. Shabu Orem — Restaurant in Orem

Today was our first, and probably last experience at Shabu Shabu dining. A good experience, but one we don't have to repeat Mr. Shabu in Orem was the setting. We had never done this before, so we were completely clueless on the process. Our gracious server explained the process, we chose our broths and meats, and off we went to the "salad" bar to choose veggies, noodles, and seafood to cook in our broth. The bar is overwhelming. Here's a few pointers from our experience. Skip the fish balls, they are rubbery gobs of sadness. The sausage ain't sausage, it's hot dogs. Leave it there. The seafood is good, but a mess. Head on shrimp are delish, but prepare to peel hot shrimp after cooking them. The crab looks cool, but not much meat there. You'll be able to suck a bit out of the shoulders, and that's about it. The best thing I found was the selection of mushrooms you don't see or eat every day. Appetizers are included in the cost of the meal. I don't recommend getting the sampler. It's too much food. Between my wife and I, that appetizer sampler would have been a filling meal all by itself. We let quite a bit of it go to waste. The fries are fries, you've had fries before, don't waste digestive space on them. There are dumplings on the salad bar to cook in your broth, do you really need fried dumplings? Instead, choose the one appetizer you think you'll like most and get that. If you're with a large group, this isn't such an issue. There is a selection of dipping sauces on the salad bar for dipping your meats after you cook them. Skip them. They subtract from the meat, rather than adding, and it's one more dish on an already crowded table to make a mess with. The meat is the main event, and it's all good and high quality, but honestly, I could not tell what was what. Once cooked in the broth, it's all pretty much the same. If your chopstick game is weak, just go for a fork. And even if you're on point with chopsticks, consider a bib. You're going to get messy. I felt like a toddler. When it's all said and done, you'll be full, you'll have had fun, and you'll realize this: for half the price, you could have gone to your favorite ramen place, gotten a large bowl of your favorite broth with noodles, meat, and veggies, and basically eaten...

We came here for my birthday and it was quite fun getting to try different foods (such as wood ear fungus, which I had seen online) and share broths and recommendations amongst the group. We particularly like the sweet soy sauce flavored broth. The hot and fresh cream cheese wantons were also really good, they’re sweeter than usual so they don’t need to be paired with a sweet and sour sauce.

If you haven’t been, this is how it works:

Pick a flavor of broth and your meats and order from your server. Hot appetizers are also ordered from your server.

Walk around a get a plate and your non-meat foods like seafood, vegetables, noodles, and sauces.

Cook your food by putting it in the hot broth. For the thin meats, just hold them with your tongues and dip them, waving them around a little if you like them more cooked. For thicker stuff like onions, mushrooms, rice cakes (teokk), and noodles, you may want to leave it in the broth for a few minutes.

Put your cooked foods in your bowl with tongs, and use your ladle to scoop broth into your bowl to make a little soup. I recommend dipping stuff in soy or ponzu sauce as well just before you eat it, but be careful of drips.

There’s a dial under the edge of the table to adjust the heat of your broth. For the tonkatsu and the beef bone broth we found that boiling them for a little while increased the flavor and tasted really good. But don’t go too long or it gets really salty.

Eat as much as you want, but try to finish what you have before getting more.

My roommate mixed together beef bone broth, the soy sauce broth, and a little spicy broth and said the combo was really good.

We came here for lunch, but I’d like to come back for dinner to be able to try the sushi. I think hotpot and sushi might be too lunch unless you’re sharing among a large group. I’d probably stick to one or the other though.

They also had vanilla ice cream as a reward for writing a Google Review. :) Hence why I am getting around to writing this much sooner than...

*I am reviewing the all-you-can-eat sushi. We did NOT try the hot pot yet.

FOOD: The sushi could have been excellent, but it was way over-dressed—piles of tobiko I had to scrape off. I’m already not a fan of tobiko, but I’m okay with a small amount. The sauces drowned the roll to where you could not taste much else. Every roll we tried was like this: very mushy and swimming in the sauces. It would have been better to stick to their simple rolls, but we were also trying to get our money's worth. The appetizers were great. We got a sampler of all to try. We assumed a sampler would have small amounts, but we were given a lot of fries we had to finish. The Korean fried chicken was not great, cold and dry. But you can’t go wrong with the other appetizers.

SERVICE: I will preface the server was very nice!! However, she asked us what we wanted right as she handed us the menu and was waiting for us to choose, which I thought was odd. We needed a moment to decide. We waited maybe 20 min to get appetizers and then another 10 minutes for our drinks to come… weird that it was in that order. Sushi came about 10 minutes later, so we waited about 40 minutes for our first round, which was limited to 3 items. After we finished, it took quite a while for our server to come back so we could order the next round, but at that point, we were not interested in any more rolls, so we got yellowtail nigiri. That took another 15-20 min. 🫠 At this point, we just really wanted to be done. I’m not sure we would have even been able to order another round with the time limit on the all-you-can-eat. We also asked for refills, and my husband got his water, and then I waited another 5-10 for her to bring back my Diet Coke. Again odd.

Ultimately, we spent about $80 with the tip for the all-you-can-eat x2 and one soda.

I would not recommend this place for sushi; well, their specialty rolls. I’m not sure how their simple rolls...