Ombu — Restaurant in Orem

Added respond (Sep 6, 2022) : No one in our party is named Ethan nor do we have anything to do with BYU, the restaurant owner has mistaken us with another group. And looking at their various responses they haven’t acknowledged employee mistakes, apologized to anyone or taken any responsibility.

——original post below——- It makes me sad to be writing a poor review for one of our favorite restaurants. We have been here 20+ times, usually on weekdays during Lunch. The food and service have always been great but we had an experience bad enough that we feel obligated to share our negative experience. We had a reservation for 5:30 pm and were seated around 5:40. Several members of our party arrived around 05:50, at which point we placed our first order. Typically the staff are very attentive to our grill temperature but on this night the waitress ignored us and only came over when our 2 year old spilled some water. Because she had been ignoring us the grill was too cold and was taking too long to cook our food. When we asked to place a second order (remember this is all you can eat), the waitress came over and said we can't order because they have a 90 minute restriction and she claimed we had been there for 2 hours. My husband and I looked at the time and it was only 7:00 pm, well within the 90 minute limit. When we informed her of this, rather than acknowledging the mistake she then went on telling us that we were just eating TOO SLOW! We told her that the grill wasn't working right, no matter how we turned it, it wouldn’t heat up high enough! She then told us that she saw us trying to adjust it multiple times, meaning she was aware of the difficulty we were having and yet chose to ignore us. She begrudgingly said she would place a last order for us. After that our two year old spilled some water again, and when we asked for some napkins to clean it up her first response, roughly translated to English, was “oh, it’s YOU guys again”. Our friend at this point became argumentative with her, at which point she then went and misstated the facts to another table, blaming and accusing us. We didn’t understand why our waitress was ignoring us and treating us the way she did from the outset of our visit. It makes us sad that our last visit was so unpleasant and we were treated so badly. My hope in writing this review is that Ombu will train it's staff on acting in a more fair, and equitable manner towards all of their guests. Additionally, they should have a system in place to track the amount of time that has elapsed since the first...

Note: in reference to a different review, it’s clearly posted right as you walk in that there’s a 90 minute time limit.

I had been holding off coming here because I love another nearby restaurant that’s Japanese bbq. However what finally brought me in is my love of Ombu Hotpot in SLC, which is my favorite restaurant of 2022, which is under the same ownership as Ombu Grill. Ombu Grill far exceeded my expectations and I regret not having come in to try sooner.

The menu is basically comprised of pictures and the item name. The portion sizes are pretty big. It’s AYCE, but don’t let that fool you into ordering too much food. As far as meat we got the kalbi ribs, beef tongue, pork belly, and some other beef items. All were good. At first it seemed like perhaps the grill wasn’t on as high as it could be; it was taking a little bit to cook, but the side options were great and held us over. We had our grill top replaced and managed to turn the grill up slightly and it made a difference.

The sides we ordered were the kimchi fried rice, cold Korean noodles, fried shrimp for our toddler (she loved it), takoyaki, and fried chicken. They all exceeded my expectations.

The verdict: all of the food was very good. The service was good. The ambience is cool. The grills get kind of smoky, and depending on how the waiter/waitress sets the temperature it may be hot or take some time. Of course, the higher you adjust it the smokier it gets. We came home smelling a little smoky, but our bellies were happy. Very good experience. I do think there’s another local place (umami) that has better quality meat, but Ombu’s sides are BY FAR the best for any Utah based KBBQ.

Also we loved all of the keychains and items they had for sale at the front and bought a Crayon Shinchan (Japanese kid show character) keychain for our toddler.

I would recommend, and if I wasn’t moving in a few days I would definitely be back, and...

My coworkers and I went to OMBU tonight for the first time AND I personally will not be returning, this place is freezing cold inside! The four of us arrived and had to leave our jackets on along with everyone else who was in there. For some reason, our group of four were only given two menus instead of our own individual menus. The meat portions are very small. To start off, we ordered beef, shrimp, chicken and barbecued fried rice, We thought that would be a good start for the four of us. It would’ve been nice if The waiter would’ve told us that the meat portions came with only five pieces, there were four of us in our group so we each got one piece of Beef, one shrimp, one chicken, and the barbecued fried rice didn’t look or taste barbecued so we told the waiter that we order the barbecued fried rice and we’re given the regular fried rice and we showed her the picture. We told her that the barbecue fried rice we were given didn’t look barbecued and in the picture it had a tinted sauce look to it & she said the picture was not correct because that’s not how it really looks. We were there almost 2 hours and pretty much ignored. We were so ignored that when I wanted to get a waiters attention, I had to turn up my grill so it would start smoking and then someone would come over to turn it down and then I was able to ask for more food. As we went up to the register to pay, I noticed they had a menu with fancy looking drinks & I wondered why we were never given that menu option. Needless to say we left hungry, disappointed in the customer...