12/31/2001

Todai is a Japanese Seafood Buffet restaurant located in Redmond Town Center. All you can eat, for one price. We saw an ad for this place before it opened - 30 different kinds of sushi, all sorts of hot and cold entrees, desserts, etc. It sounded great! So we tried to go there for dinner a week after it opened. The place was PACKED, and we faced a 2-hour wait. And almost everyone there was Japanese - a great sign! We gave up that night, but returned for lunch a couple weeks later when it was less packed.

Todai offers a HUGE variety of Japanese seafood dishes, more than any Japanese restaurant I've been to before. We went for the sushi first - they have lots of different original rolls, many of which were very good. The rest of the sushi was good, but not as good as many sushi-only restaurants. Overall, if you're going there just for the sushi, then go to a dedicated sushi restaurant, or even Sushiland - you'll get better sushi.

But Todai really excels at variety. They have cold foods: Sushi, salads, kim chee, seaweed salad, lobster claws, etc. They have hot foods: Shrimp, calamari, chicken, scalops, mussels, udon noodle soup, etc. They have desserts: freshly made crepes, cakes, cheesecakes, fruit, etc. All of it is average or above, and if you like seafood then this place is like heaven on earth with all of its variety. The only real disappointment was the lobster claws - cold, bland, tough, and hard to crack. They just weren't worth it.

Bottom Line: Amazing variety of good seafood, at a reasonable price for what you get.