'All you can eat' – but should you?

Needing to feed young ones, I tried two of Amsterdam's all you can eat restaurants. They were filling, but were they fulfilling?

The ick. A term that came into fashion a few years ago to describe that rapid drop in attraction towards someone or something you were previously into. This wave of disgust is often caused by the trivial. Examples found online: ordering Frappuccinos (fair); wearing shoes without socks; DMing someone a Reel.

I’ll be honest: the ick gives me the ick these days. It’s become heinously overused — a harsh, almost performative system for knocking people down against invented, arbitrary standards. You could also argue it ends up reinforcing unnecessary gender norms. Just look at The guy with the list on TikTok who catalogues supposedly icky things men shouldn’t do, like putting on sunscreen and flinching at needles. Frankly, I’d rather see men who aren’t sunburnt and who feel comfortable showing a little vulnerability.

That said, all you can eat, as a dining style, gives me the ick. It conjures up images of Homer Simpson ploughing through dish after dish of seafood, of restaurants cutting costs by using the cheapest ingredients, of wasteful over-consumption for the fun of it. I don’t think anyone should approach a meal with the mindset of ‘I’m going to eat as much of this as I physically can!’ But last week, I found myself going to these types of restaurants… twice. Needs must. My needs being two teenage niblings staying with me, the must being a way to feed them gigantic amounts of food to facilitate their rapid growth into fully fledged humans. My husband, less of a Scrooge than I am, suggested we go to some all you can eat restaurants. Considering the sheer volume of calories my sixteen-year-old nephew consumes, I agreed to the idea.

MISO SUSHI.

Sidebar: Gen Z teenagers are wonderful but also utterly ridiculous. As a late 30s guncle who’s pretty attuned to popular culture, I thought we’d be on similar levels. Oh boy, I was wrong. Spending time with them was an anthropological study: they don’t take nice or serious photos, only random ones, so instead of snapping a gorgeous canal vista they’ll take a picture of themselves stood at the side of the canal and in wide angle so they’re 90% forehead; they wear wired headphones for the ‘aesthetic’ and don’t even plug them into their phones; they’re always on their phones but they literally never charge them, resulting in last minute battery panics; they describe things as ‘aura’, a beautiful wooden bridge in a forest is ‘aura,’ an old, rusty warehouse is ‘aura.’ But they’re also incredibly present, they live life as if they’re ‘live’ in the broadcast sense, and they see potential for story or ‘lore’ in everything, even bad experiences (we got heavily rained on twice and they loved it). They have their own world, and I felt privileged to be part of it.

Our all you can eat experiences definitely created some lore. The first stop was MISO SUSHI on Spuistraat. There was me, dreading the experience, sure that there was something oxymoronic about all you can eat sushi, in that fish is endangered and expensive and therefore can’t be doled out willy-nilly. There were my niblings, immediately taken by the interiors, which were, yep, aura, especially the giant, fake tree in the middle of the restaurant like a frozen firework and the glowing pictures of Kyoto on the walls. And finally, there was my husband, outlining our strategy: we could order five dishes per person every eight minutes, for a maximum of two hours. Therefore, to get our money’s worth (€39.50 per person), we needed to be organised so that when the eight-minute mark came up, we were ready to go. We needed to order high value items only, no pissing around with side salads. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked, cracking his knuckles.

Round one.

As our first order came, we were told that every dish leftover at the end would incur a fee. For sushi, it was €1 per piece and for dishes (tempura, for example), €2 per dish. Oh, this was a touch of the progressive. I was here for it, but it also didn’t stop us ingloriously chowing down round after round of nigiri and maki rolls. What it did do was slow us down towards the end as we became more mindful of the fee. Despite my husband’s calculated strategy, we did not order 15 times (that’s how many eight minute blocks are in two hours, just so you know). We only did around six or seven rounds, plus a dessert finale.

My niblings thought MISO was bougie as hell. I was surprised at the decentness of everything we ate: it wasn’t gourmet but by no means was it bad. The sushi tasted fresh, confident. It was plump and colourful and not that slapdash – only an avocado nigiri had an unsightly slop of mayo on top like someone yanked the bottle too hard. That said, the bigger the item, the more unruly they became: my temaki was as higgledy-piggledy as a first attempt at rolling a cigarette; my gunkan (battleship-shaped sushi) looked like bed hair. Our various fried bits – crispy chicken, fried sweet potatoes – were expertly textured and not too greasy, though we should have ordered less of these. Fried bits fill you up.

Round ???

As an activity, ordering food was damn fun, flicking through the options on an iPad, debating what we should have, sending our list and then waiting mere minutes for food to arrive. My niblings went hyper, then hyper again. The meal was, I was told, one of the biggest successes of our weekend. Our bill was barely €120 for four people, which represented incredible value, unless of course it was a trick of the eye and the span of eight-minute intervals meant we actually ate less than we thought we did. I doubt it though, and if there was a trick, I couldn’t tell you what it was. Perhaps it was just good value.

By the time I got home I was full in an unpleasant way, needing a peppermint tea and a pillow under my stomach. Yes, we could have ordered more sensibly, but the system didn’t exactly encourage it (clue’s in the name). And the restaurant’s wastage rule, which I loved in principle (as a general rule, I never leave an animal product unfinished – too much suffering has happened for even a morsel of meat to end up in a bin), meant that we had to conversely battle through our final dishes when we were already at bursting point.

Nomi’s menu.

Our next all you can eat experience was at Nomi, the Korean barbecue joint that is super-popular, if not a little industrial in its output: you have to wonder how many hundreds of kilos of meat are barbecued there every day. Best not to think about it? Perhaps. We sat around a hot plate in the centre of our table, flipping slithers of meat with prongs while crunching through tiny mounds of kimchi. This time, we ordered less but Korean barbecue is nearly all meat, mostly beef, and so eating at Nomi gave me what I call beef pains: the curious condition my stomach suffers through when I eat too much beef. It feels full, heavy, like it’s been filled with lead. I did think the bulgogi, fantastically thin, blood-red strips of ribeye, were salty and succulent when eaten straight off the heat and dipped in some sammjang sauce. Pork cuts wrapped in crispy lettuce were another delight. The act of barbecuing slowed us down (a good thing) and I’m pretty sure, value-wise, we didn’t make as good a return an investment as we did at MISO. I couldn’t tell you because my husband wasn’t there to conduct an audit on our spend.

But did I change my mind? Is my ick less icky? As a model for fun, cheap eating, all you can eat got a big thumbs up from my niece and nephew, and from my husband, who doesn’t over-intellectualise things like I do and is a happier person for it. Personally, I’m less sure. I was impressed by how these restaurants managed consumption, offering genuine value while discouraging grotesque over-ordering. Regardless, in both cases I simply ate too much, the first because of volume and the second because of the type (those beef pains, they linger). While the food didn’t end up in the bin, it didn’t need to be eaten either. I’d also say that while I was full I wasn’t fulfilled: it’s not a style of dining that encourages mindfulness – there’s something a little flattening about savouring a dish when you know you can order many more at no extra cost.

Is my ick itself icky? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

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OK BYE!

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