Big Meal Japanese & Asian Restaurant

This restaurant is now out of business. I’m not surprised, given the reviews.
I just hope the next person who picks this place up doesn’t make it into another sushi restaurant. This has been the 3^rd failed sushi restaurant in a row.

My experience seems to differ from some of my fellow Unilocalers. Perhaps it was because I came on a Monday, but service was stellar.
I came here with my girlfriend for dinner after work. There was plenty of parking and the restaurant was pretty busy for a Monday.
The interior is spacious and clean, and the tables are spaced far enough apart for privacy. There are 2 big screen televisions — one that runs a constant slide show of menu offerings and the other on the channel du jour.
Dinner is $ 20.95 Mon-​Thurs. They have the typical AYCE Japanese buffet offerings in addition to some «specialty rolls» and a handful of Chef’s Specials of which you are entitled to choose one of.
I have to applaud the service here as the staff were all very pleasant. They asked us what we thought about the food, and were all very friendly and jolly. The owner even said «You’re leaving already? There’s so much more desserts to try!» I’ve never been to an AYCE where they encourage you to stay and eat MORE.
We had:
Assorted Sashimi (Butter Fish, White Tuna, Salmon)
Tempura (Sweet Potato & Shrimp)
Dynamite Roll
Spicy Salmon Roll
Grilled Eel Sushi
Garlic Sirloin Beef Cubes
Beef Short Ribs
Crab Meat Salad
Miso Soup
Octopus Balls
Creamy Mussels
«Japanese Cake»
Sesame Ice Cream
Grilled Banana
One thing they do not do here is tack on the automatic 10% gratuity — perhaps that’s why service is so good?
They take VISA and debit.
This is going to be my go-​to place in Scarborough for AYCE from now on. Bye bye Ten-​Ichi.

Food was average.
Service was horrendous. Waiters /​Waitresses who forget to put in your order after you’ve handed it to them, that is the norm here.
Save your money and go to either Aji Sai or Tenichi.

What a bad restaurant. The salmon sashimis were not fresh, the avocados were brown and the miso soup was almost cold, overall was not good. Price too high for the quality they offer. Will not go back there again.

I felt compelled to write an updated review since I was first to write a review on this establishment and give it a 4 star rating.
Based off my past recent experiences, I would now give it a 2.5 star rating for the following reasons.
The quality of food is still good for a Japanese ayce establishment. You can’t expect the sashimi quality to be the same quality as Zen or Café Michi, you get what you pay for. Sometimes the food can be hit and miss. Sometimes specials are not available and the presentation of food has dropped, initially the plate presentation was great for an ayce hence the rating dropped.
The area where standards have really dropped and is close to an absolute mess is the service. The recent posts are pretty accurate. When you first walk in the door, no one greets you or seats you anymore for at least 5 minutes which feels quite embarrassing and keep in mind, the place is never ¹⁄₃ full.
The place sometimes is shortstaffed, leaving the waiters/​waitresses frustrated and it shows in the way customers are serviced. Having a kettle of green tea placed on your table along with a menu takes a while when it should be the first thing done once your seated. The biggest issue with the establishment is the kitchen, the food takes an abnormally long time to get to your table which is ridiculous considering the place is never full. When I say long, usually 30 minutes minimum or longer which is really long compared to it’s competitors in Markham or in general.
In the end, management really needs to address these problematic issues specifically service and how slow the kitchen is or the place IMHO won’t last longer than a year. It’s quite disappointing since the place has only been open since November and the standards have dropped so fast.

Went here for AYCE lunch and they consistently missed items. Our server, a young man who was obviously flustered with the lunch rush, actually crumpled up our order sheet in front of us after only serving the first item on the sheet. However, the sushi was standard AYCE sushi quality.

We were ready to give this place a try. We were seated in the side room and we only got one menu and only after 10 minutes. My wife had to go to another table to get the order chits that this restaurant uses.
The order was taken in a surly manner after my wife stood up to get attention. We thought that our seaweed salad and miso soup would be forthcoming. After 40 minutes in the restaurant, we decided to leave as nothing had been brought to the table, and nothing had been said to us. On leaving we tried to let them know and our server simply walked away from us. They show a time limit of 1.5 hours to dine here… Who are they kidding?
With this kind of service we will never be back. Several other tables were in the same boat. We did go elsewhere and had a good dinner. Why do people invest in restaurants and throw their money away this?
Don’t go there if you are hungry!

This sushi place got to be the WORST service ever! This sushi place is like many AYCE sushi resturants where the service, food, and food presentation is very good and months or even weeks, everything starts going to hell and eventually close down. Well this is going to be one of them!
One of my friend recommended this place to me because it just open and she thought it was pretty good, so I was like «what the hell why not try this place out». for the first time I went there with my family it was pretty good, and thought I would come back for the second time hoping the service and food would still be good.
Today was actually my 2^nd time coming and all i have to say. FOOOOOOD was GARBAGEEEEEE … this time i went with my brother and my girlfriend. Once i entered the restaurant, literally NOBODY even help seat us for a table, we stood there like a dumbass for 10min as the two zombie like waitress just kept staring at the floor and walk by me as I kept saying «excuse me!»
Eventually the manager seated us which was nice of him to even notice my existence. My first order had at least 10 items as we were very hungry! and only half of the items we ordered came, everything I ordered was horrible except for the sushi and sashimi, all the items that were grilled took literally 30min-​40min! like WHAT THE F***!!! when the steak, squid ball, and other grilled item came, it was ALL over cook and very unappetizing! steak was over cooked, it was like chewing on rubber bands.
When we ordered miso soup, they gave us seafood soup, salad didnt even come till the end!!! and we had to keep writing it down again and again until we got the manager and asked him to get it for us. We’ve ordered the mango salad, and OMG IT TASTED LIKE CRAPPPPPPPPPP! who the hell makes mango salad with lettuce, thousand island dressing with slices of mango and on top of that they put mango sauce, like what the hell. it looked more like a noodle soup with shit load of yellow sauce.
basically, i do not recommend this place to anybody, they are bound to close any day. the 2 fob waitresses are garbage, learn to smile, and talk, not walk around like zombies, it took they so long to even punch in the orders. all the waiters and waitress were running around like headless chickens! they dont even know what items were going where! If anybody is in the scarborough area I would stick to Matsuda on steels and middlefield. Thanks for reading my long review and i hope that place close down because not only me, brother, and girlfriend were fraustrated, there were at least 3 other tables that were yelling at the manager because none of their food arrived.

After seeing this restaurant got 4 stars — I decided to give this a try. Will I go back there again? NO!!!
Not a lot of variety in sashimi
Red Tuna — special (Limit 1 order per person) came out size of a dice
Salmon — not fresh — a little on the slimy side…
Sweet Shrimp — ran out — no notice from the waitress in the beginning until we asked
Octopus — special (Limit 1 order per person) ran out — no notice from the waitress in the beginning until we asked
Eel Nigiri — tiny piece of eel; huge glob of rice.
Flying Fish Roe — Ok
Salmon Roe — OK
Shrimp Tempura — Small Shrimp with lots of tempura flour
Grilled Beef Ribs — Bland
Fried Fish with Eggs — OK
Grilled Squid — never came out — don’t know what happened; didn’t ask
Snow Crab Legs-​special (Limit 1 order per person)-most ridiculous thing ordered-​instead of a cluster of snow crab; 1 leg came out… I was in awe…
Baked Scallop — ran out; they offered to substitute scallop sashimi instead; not fresh
Salmon Belly/​Steamed Egg/​Avocado Salad/​Seaweed Salad/​Surf Clam — pretty good; could order more
There were only 4 – 5 tables and the food came out really slow… I keep having to ask the waitress where the food was…
I probably need to look at reviews with more reviewers as suppose to the ratings…

Went here last week with a couple of girlfriends to catch up on some girl talk. I made reservations 2 hours earlier to get us a spot because it was a friday night. When we got there, we were seated in one of the side rooms as the restaurant was really busy that night. Much to our surprise (after we ordered) there was actually a birthday party going on. We were basically minding our own business, enjoying some appetizers (soup, fried chicken) when a live band started playing. This was when it started to get really really annoying! First of all, there was no door or anything to shield off the noise. The noise level got to a ridiculous point and i just couldnt stand yelling anymore to talk to my friends. I finally flagged a waitress down as they werent paying much attention to the people outside of the party and asked her if she could kindly do something about the noise control… she looked at me with a blank stare and said, «NO». UMmm ok…
After getting tired of waiting for someone to come and collect our order slip, i decided to give the order slip to the manager and complain about the noise. When i found her, she was at the computer with her hands covering her ears. She said she would do what she can… 30 mins later while we were seated they closed one of the doors. It didnt help much, but still it was nice that they tried. After ordering dessert, when it was time to pay the bill the waitress came around with the machine and noticed that there was a $ 0.00 beside the tip… she asks, «theres no tip?» (I was going to leave a cash tip) We just said, can i speak to your manager? and sure enough… she came by and we just told her everything that went wrong. It was a long night… what was supposed to be 1.5 hrs turned out to be 3 hours.
PROS
The food — tried pretty much everything but my favourites included the spicy salmon and white tuna sushi, garlic beef (good, but not as good as ten-ichi’s), spider roll, sashimi (all good), volcano roll etc.
CONS
parking… one of our friends had to park at the community center across the street.
THE SERVICE!!! why would they allow a party with a really LOUD band and other customers seated basically next to each other. They needed to either lower their volume or get some noise shield to filter that out. If we had known about this before we wouldn’t have eaten there that night!
We ordered stuff that they apparently didn’t have like crab legs… the waitress told us that these were the specials but didn’t even tell us what they did or didn’t have.
The waitresses didn’t come around as much as id like which i guess can be understandable because of the party.
The food took forever! like i said before, what was supposed to take 1.5 hrs took 3 hrs. ridiculous!
They didnt even come around to tell us when last call was making it too late for us to order some items.
The rude and ridiculous waitress begging for a tip… that was just a unnecessary.
So why did i give this place ²⁄₅ stars? well because like i said, the food was great but the service made this dining experience one of the worst i’ve ever had. We ended up going to tims to catch up on girl talk later… why didn’t we think of that before? haha!
i don’t know if i’d return…

I’ve been going to this restaurant weekly now, and I always order sweet shrimp sashimis since this is the only place I know offering it (for all you can eat). All the raw food are nice and fresh, the only thing I don’t like is prob the beef tataki, it’s still half frozen every time they serve.
The desserts are pretty good too, my fav is the mango yogurt and they always have new stuff every week.
(2^nd review after 1 month)
The service level is going down hill… and i was there at 7 PM last Sunday… all the sweet shrimps were out… it’s hard to say I’ll go back again.

Big Meal Japanese & Asian Restaurant is located at the corner of Kennedy and McNicoll Avenue.
This plaza seemed to be cursed as aside from the Spa, no other businesses able to remain open for a long time… some even last for a few short months. Will Big Meal survive?
Dinner ($ 22.95) on a Sunday night is in line with the other AYCE I been to. The menu also quite similar with addition of a few items.
We ordered quite a few items to try out:
— Sashimi: Salmon, Butter Fish, Surf Clam (they are out on Sweet Shrimp) A-​OK
— Sushi: Flying Fish Roe A-​OK
— Hand Roll: Spicy Salmon Roll A-​OK
— Maki Roll: Volcano Roll, Unagi Roll, Spider Roll A-​OK
— Salad: Mango Salad, Seaweed Salad, Mixed Green
— Soup: Miso Soup
— Steamed Egg Custard A-​OK
— Grilled Salmon Belly A-​OK
— Grilled Steak, really dry MEH
— Shrimp Tempura A-​OK
— Grilled Eggplant OK
— Grilled Beef Ribs OK
— Vegetables OK
— Grilled BlacK Cod A-​OK
— Dumplings OK
— Grilled Squid Dry MEH
— Snow Crab Leg A-​OK
— Baked Scallop small and chewy MEH
— Garlic Shrimp was oily MEH
— Spicy Seafood Ramen, really bland and worse tasting bowl of Ramen ever
— Dessert: Sesame and Red Bean Ice Cream, Mixed Fruit (Strawberry and Orange)
Overall the food quality were quite good.
Sushi/​Sashimi/​Rolls all fresh and nicely presented. The «Teriyaki» and Grilled all tasted similar as they were all drowned in the same sauce. The special item was a little disappointed. Cook food from the kitchen just average and some below average.
Services can be a little slow. We have to ask for refill of tea a few time. The place was just half full…
10% gratuity is not automatically added so please remember to leave a tip.
Big Meal does have potential to be another decent AYCE Japanese Restaurant. Improvement needs to be make definitely in the Kitchen for their cook food.
I will be back again for lunch!