tonight is the first night of my night shift. no, i’m not a call center agent but i might as well be because of this shifting scheme that we have. this is so that we can give our client the 24-hour support that they need for today and the next few days.
actually, staying in the office this late is nothing new. we’ve been doing this before in the form of overtime. the only difference now is the name (night shift) and the people involved (we did overtime as a group. in this shifting scheme, the group is divided into people who would provide support during the day and those who would provide support during the night). we ate dinner before our shift began.
unlike before when we ate at either ChowaBunga at the i1 building or Crunch Chicken at Skyrise, we decided to slightly break way from our usual eating routine and try out the eat-all-you-can dinner at a Japanese/Korean restaurant, Grand Blue. i didn’t like the idea very much at first mainly because shelling out around 300 to 400 bucks for an eat-all-you-can (buffet) dinner (where I might not get to eat a lot since the food is new to me) did not seem practical. but as you read the rest of this post, you’ll see that the experience turned out okay. 
Grand Blue is that relatively new Japanese/Korean restaurant beside the C24 convenience store along, er, I don’t know the name of the road. i have a very poor sense of direction. hehehe. basta that road going to Salinas drive. if you know where C24 is, you can’t miss this resto.
when we we neared the door of the resto, we were greeted by a friendly waitress and the very accommodating manager (unfortunately, we weren’t able to get her name). we were lucky. there was a 20% discount on the buffet dinner. 
Grand Blue’s “eat-all-you-can” style is different from those of other restaurants. in other restaurants, you get food from a table where the food is served. In Grand Blue, you are just seated at your table until a waitress approaches you and hands you the menu. you get to choose a particular “set” of food that you want to order and this will be served to you after a few minutes. if you would like a “refill” of the food, you just call a waitress and request for a refill. “the sky is the limit”, as the manager said.
we ordered the dinner set . the dinner set, according to the menu, was composed of sushi, sashimi, pork belly and rice. but we were actually served more than what was written on the menu. i felt weird when the food was finally served to us, mainly because i rarely eat in japanese restaurants and i’m not used to seeing slivers of raw fish on rice (sushi) being served on the table. maybe i’ll get used to seeing this kind of food in time. anyway, i liked the squid ( not on the menu but it was served to us anyway ) that was served to us. maybe the reason is that the sauce tasted like the one used for chopsuey, which is more familiar to my Filipino palate. the squid also tasted great with the kimchi rice.
speaking of kimchi, i also ate the actual kimchi out of curiousity. i had long wanted to taste it and know its ingredients. it turned out that kimchi was just pickled cabbage. it was pickled alright but it was not sour like pickled cucumber. on the contrary, it was very spicy. the spicy taste may be due to the red orange thingies (imagine red orange grated coconut–that’s what those thingies look like) that stuck to the kimchi. the kimchi left a slight burning sensation in my mouth even long after i swallowed it with the aid of a glass of water. the kimchi rice, on the other hand, was not as spicy as the actual kimchi. it also had nori strips. i’ve always liked nori ever since i first tasted it. so that’s maybe part of the reason why i liked the kimchi rice.
i didn’t eat the sushi. i had long given up on eating raw fish, as it caused me a tummy disaster during several occasions. i sampled some maki, though. they were okay. we were also served soup. it was like sukiyaki. it had vermicilli noodles, minus the raw egg that you had to mix in the soup of the sukiyaki. the soup served to us at Grand Blue had whole cooked quail’s eggs instead. unfortunately, i wasn’t able to taste a quail egg because there were only a few eggs in the soup. next time, i’ll make sure i’ll be more alert for quail eggs. hehehe.
we were also served sizzling and grilled pork. i found the grilled pork particularly yummy, but it’s still second to the squid. imagine, i was able to consume about two servings of the squid. hey, the plates used to serve the squid were just small ones. just little platitos. so i didn’t eat too much. ( defensive ) anyway, i really liked the squid. i’m always eating either noodles or rice with meat during my meals at home or at work, that’s why i always eat seafood when the opportunity presents itself (which is very seldom).
we started eating at around 8:00pm and we left the restaurant at around 9:30pm. even though the food seemed weird to us at first, they were not weird enough to diminish our appetites (and curiosity!). i wish i have pictures of the food to post in this blog. i’m sure my words are not enough to describe in detail what the food at Grand Blue looked like. maybe i can get copies of the pictures my officemate took in the restaurant and post them here soon.
a note related to my previous post: i know i promised i won’t blog until after the nihongo exam is over but because of the night shift, which compounds my lack-of-time-to-study problem, i’m too tired to care about the results of the exam. bahala na.
