YummY!
Jotaro's Food Review
Big Buffet @ Wok & More Vienna
Vienna, Austria - October 2015
Looking for good and cheap food while you are in Vienna? Then Wok & More at Karlplatz is the place; this place serves what they call a BIG BUFFET - it's big because of the extensive range of food that they offer and what's more is the food is very fresh!
It's a restaurant that serves Oriental fare (mainly Chinese and Japanese) with a bit of Western fare too.
What's more is that except for desserts, snacks and soups, most of the food is served fresh and uncooked. No, I don't mean they served raw food Shashimi style (although there are some of these); what I meant was that raw food can be chosen from a wide ranged placed on two long counters. Choose the food onto your plate and then take it to the chef for immediate cooking on a large hot plate (Teppanyaki style).
Patrons are encouraged to go as many rounds as possible and not to pile up food. This is a good policy and then customers will tend to take less each round and the tendency to waste food is much reduced.
Pricing is very reasonable for a "All You Can Eat" joint; on weekdays lunch is at 9.90€, and dinner is at 14.90€. The dinner price is higher but the choice of food is more extensive and better. Both meals does not include drinks, these can be ordered ala carte. For other days' and children's' pricing see the above photo. For those who want to skip this buffet, they have an ala carte menu.
The photo also shows the list of sauces that are available for the selected food to be cooked in.
The L-shaped dining hall is fairly large with table seating arrangements for two, four or more.
The smaller of the L-section, facing the bar has an aquarium with cute pink chichlids.
The bar counter.
Okay, enough of the restaurant interior; let's have a look at the food. Food in the buffet counter is separated into fresh greens, fruits, meat, seafood and desserts.
Let's start off with the soups; usually there are two soups, one being a light Miso soup and the other a Tom Yum or creamy thicker one like mushrooms etc.
The oriental fresh greens section with raw mushrooms, leek, bean sprouts, etc. These are not eaten raw and needs to be cooked.
The Western greens, most of these can be eaten as a raw salad, even the bamboo shoots (at bottom left), black fungi and the tofu.
Next to the fresh greens were pickled fruits, veggies and some mixed greens. The pickled onions and cucumbers were excellent. There were boiled Brussels sprouts too.
Shushi - salmon, crab-stick, egg roll, tuna salad, etc.
Shushi rolls!
The rest of the food, starting with some sea-food:
Cuttlefish and crab-sticks.
Fresh scallops, Pomfret fish, prawns, salmon breasts, etc.
Cooked mussels.
Raw salmon fillet (these are meant for cooking and not as shashimi), cuttlefish (these come in whole small cuttlefish and cut pieces of large ones), cooked and raw mussels, chicken breast meat, and white wantans.
Salmon breasts, these were creamily tasteful.
Chicken meat on a stick.
My favourite - nice cuts of marbled steak. These were small pieces about four inches in diameter, just nice for fast cooking on a hot plate. I had four pieces of these with them cooked separately with a simple cream sauce.
A close up of the scallops, showing how fresh they were.
This is the pre-cooked section, mostly fried food like deep-fried wantans, prawn fritters, fish fingers and fried rice.
The sauces included chilli, Wasabi and pickled ginger. At the back were jars of cookies, fried fish balls and crackers.
Fresh fruits, including pineapples, honey-dew, grapes, apples and oranges.
Some of the desserts, like Tiramisu, pink agar-jelly, yellow corn agar-jelly, etc.
One of the chefs at the hot-plate, cooking my meal.... actually one of my meals (I went about five rounds; but please don't have the impression that I was greedy - they were small rounds of different types of food, i.e. salad, mains and desserts).
The hot plate is long; several meals can be cooked simultaneously. A cover is used for cooking food that takes longer, like meat, etc.
Now let's have a look at some of what I ate:
Miso soup, with lots of soft white tofu, sea-weed and spring onions.
My first round of the mains, I made the mistake of mixing the chicken with the sea-food.
Although the chefs try to separate out meat from seafood and vegetables during cooking, it's best to take these as different courses. This one is cooked with a Thai Curry Sauce, after this eating this, I feel seafood should just be cooked without any sauce or at best with just a pinch of salt.
Close up of a salmon breast, not that much meat but it was one of a creamier variety.
A couple of mussels, juicy and succulent.
My second round, another mistake made. The steak should be cooked all by itself instead of together with the stir-fried vegetables that were cooked with some prawns and cuttlefish.
And noodles cooked with some chicken meat, mushrooms, prawns, bean sprouts and some green vegetables. This one were udon noodles fried with curry sauce.
A mouth-watering close up view of a scallop.
The beautiful marbled steak spoilt by cooking in curry sauce (my mistake, not the chef's) should have just gone without any sauce. Still, it was quite good as the meat was tender and the marbled fat added a good burnt aroma.
And ended off with a couple of cakes for desserts - Tiramisu which was excellent, and...
... a pinkish fruity agar-jelly. I could not tell whether it was guava or watermelon, the fruit flavour was a bit to light to tell.
WOK & MORE VIENNA
Karlsplatz 1 (Ecke Kärntnerstraße), A-1010 Wien, Austria.
Hours: Lunch- 11:30 am to 4:30 pm / Dinner- 5:00pm to 10:30pm (Opens everyday)
GPS: 48.201150, 16.369450
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