Yayan Specialty BBQ

極野宴燒肉專門店

4th Floor, No. 789 Zhonghua 5th Rd, Qianzhen Dist
高雄市前鎮區中華五路789號4樓
(07)821-8080

Monday-Sunday
11:30am-3:00pm
5:00pm-10:00pm

English friendly: yes
vegetarian friendly: lol
average cost: 489/589NTD

Here we have another restaurant I ate at, left the city for two weeks, then came back and tried to write a review for. So this review is going to be heavy on the pictures and light on my distracted ramblings. That's probably better for all of us anyway.

It is also another high class mall chain restaurant! This time in the Dream Mall, and of the all-you-can-eat variety. That means you pay about $20USD and can stay there for HOURS (though actually I think they have a time limit of two hours...), gorging yourself on every item on their menu.

For some reason all-you-can-eat restaurants in Taiwan tend to be MUCH classier than those in the US, for a comparable price. I'm not a huge fan of stuffing myself with enormous quantities of food over the course of multiple hours, but once in a while it can make for a real nice treat. The number one thing that recommends this place over all other all-you-can-eat BBQ in Kaohsiung is this: all-you-can-drink beer.

I repeat: LIMITLESS BEER. 

All the ingredients required for a fun Thursday afternoon.

Their menu is pretty gigantic, with different sections for chicken, beef, seafood, etc, and full English (and Japanese) translations. And you can get anything you want off of it! Anything at all!

The waitress asked us if we wanted a pitcher of beer, coke, or roasted barley tea with our meal and we got ALL of them, because we could!

All menu items come raw, and you barbecue them yourself on the above charcoal stove thing. They put a grate on top of it, of course, and the waitress even came by after the first hour to switch out a new one not all covered in drippings. I tried to help her but I was pretty drunk by that point so.

All tables come with a free giant boat of raw seafood, which looks like this.

As well as some vegetables! We didn't dig into these until the end of the meal, when we started feeling guilty, but oh man! Those water chestnuts, the white things above, were totally awesome! Do not miss out on them.

Some sort of meat and stuff. By the way, each table comes with salt and pepper shakers (OMG, you can add SALT, the BESSSSST), as well as this soy sauce-looking sauce that does not taste like soy sauce, and goes quite well with meat of all kinds. Though not as well as salt does.

Thin strips of meat! Helpful tips for cooking these guys: lay them on the grill and watch a bit until you see their top sides start to "sweat", flip them over, and then take them off almost immediately. Devour them happily.

Scallops on ice! Someone who knows more than I intimated that these were fake scallops, because of the way they fell apart when you pulled at them or something. I'm no expert on scallops, but I thought they tasted pretty delicious all the same.

Fish in a dish! The aluminum pans you can put directly on the grill, and let the stuff inside slowly boil/bake. We also ordered their vegetables+cheese dish, which came in an aluminum pan too, but maybe we left it on the grill too long because when I finally tried it it was SERIOUSLY nasty. Like, sour milk kind of nasty. Not exactly sure what that was about.

Happy barbecuing. Everything here was really good. Those mushrooms on the right there were especially good. I love mushrooms.

Here is something funny. Their menu advertises a cheese-stuffed American beef dish, complete with sexy gratuitous pictures up there on the bottom right...

...And it turned out to look like this. False advertising! Except even with that little bit of cheese it was absolutely, absolutely delicious. Probably my favorite thing this entire meal. And we ate a LOT, can you tell? I don't think I even photographed half of it...

Cheesy beef rolls in action, and more shrimps. Yeahhhhh.

There are a few options for dessert, including this very charismatic Japanese mochi dish, meant to be barbecued for several minutes until crispy and chewy then drowned in condensed milk and peanut shavings, and eaten. DON'T MIND IF I DO. Each "order" comes with six pieces, so we got four orders because well.

I also got this VERY STRANGE pumpkin pie looking dish, with vanilla ice cream and random marshmellows. I forget exactly how it was advertised, but I know that when I bit into it I was definitely not expecting this:

Like, a sort of dry cake encasing a hunk of mochi and strawberry jam. What?

...What?

The ice cream was good though, and you can't go wrong with mochi I suppose.

Overall, I... I am mostly impressed that I ate so much. This was a really fun dining experience, not in the least because of the unlimited beer. So yeah, I definitely recommend it! It's not even that expensive, when you think about it. Several meals worth of food for the price of one.

OVERALL RATING: 4/5