All That Shabu
Korean-style shabu shabu in a clean, modern, and spacious Irvine location
Irvine’s Culver Plaza has hosted a fairly wide variety of interesting restaurants over the years, with particularly strong Chinese restaurant representation thanks to its anchor-class Sam Woo and 99 Ranch Market tenants. Over the last five years, the plaza has also hosted twin Korean restaurants – shabu-shabu buffet All That Shabu, and KBBQ concept All That Barbecue – that each occupy different spaces, but share plenty conceptually.
Both restaurants are all-you-can-eat with the same price points: $37 per adult on weekends, holidays, and 3pm-closing on weekdays, or $29 for weekday lunches, with aggressive deals on kids meals. While All That Barbecue keeps you seated at a table to order from a list of 38 items, then grill them at your table, All That Shabu lets you explore a spacious buffet area for pre-made items and raw veggies, but has you order raw meats at the table. Each person gets a boiling pot with one of six broth flavors to cook the raw ingredients, plus their choice of fountain drinks, and soft serve ice cream for dessert.
All That Shabu’s overall package is pretty compelling. Beyond the shabu-style boilable raw items, the buffet includes a sauce bar with some interesting dipping options (pine/chili, rooty mustard, and sesame leaf with cilantro among them) to ensure your meat tastes better than basic boiled. At lunch, you can order from seven pre-sliced, ready to cook meats ranging from beef to pork and chicken cuts, expanding to 11 choices at dinner with the addition of filet mignon, ribeye, beef chuck flap, and lamb shoulder. Buffet access to hot, ready-to-eat items and rice is another benefit.
As contrasted with other local shabu-shabu options at the time we visited, we appreciated All That Shabu’s clean, modern, and open interior, nice menu choices – including more meat options than rival Dada Shabu-Shabu – and friendly staff. But we found it to be pricey for the assortment and quality, especially given that Dada had more compelling hot, ready-to-eat buffet items. The pricing gap has considerably narrowed, though, and All That Shabu’s meat options outnumber Dada’s by nearly 2:1. Both are worth trying, and we suspect that picking a favorite will come down to personal preferences, more than anything else.
Stats
Price: $$-$$$
Service: Buffet
Open Since: 2019
Addresses
15315 Culver Dr.
Suite 145
Irvine, CA 92604
949.333.5222
Instagram: @allthatshabu