Restaurant: Santo’s Modern American Buffet & Sushi
Location: 3400 N. Federal Hwy, Original location in Coral Springs, FL, Boca Raton, FL 33431. +1 561-923-9378
Date: November 2, 2018
Cuisine:Modern American Buffet & Sushi
Rating: Excellent neighborhood Italian
Recently I went to Del Rey Beach Florida for the wedding of my oldest friend, Brent — which was awesome.
As part of the Florida fun we went to this interesting AYCE (All You Can Eat) sushi buffet. Since it’s so “different” than the usual sushi I blog about, I thought to write it up just for S&G.
Santo’s covers a lot of ground.
It’s very clean and has a pretty up-to-date pseudo corporate decor.
Somehow they even had a 750ml Junmai sake for like $20 — it was a touch rougher than I’m used to.
I pretty much ignored the American meat, fries, etc section of the buffet. This is presumably for the land lubbers.
Various fried things which I also ignored.
I sampled a couple of these hot items like the guilty pleasure ponzu popcorn shrimp.
Fruit? Forget about it.
Salads. Same.
Now we’re talking. The sashimi. It wasn’t the most exciting fish in the world, and some were fairly heavily sauced, but I was surprised to find they weren’t fishy. It was certainly “fine.”
Now we get into the “real” sushi. Somehow I missed photoing most of the nigiri.
You can kind of see it here on the left — bear in mind these are lousy iPhone panos. There were 10-15 various nigiri and I even enjoyed the eel.
Then TONS of rolls. Kind of a bit overdone but some were tasty and a sauce station at the end with spicy mayo, eel sauce etc.
The desserts. Needed a separate stomach for these.
One of my (many) plates. You can see some of the fairly sloppy nigiri.
And another.
This was a fun night, and while it will win no awards for most authentic or sublime sushi, I was actually surprised how decent it was — perhaps a little less Japanese but slightly better fish quality than at the revolving sushi I occasionally go to. Interesting how the Japanese sushi bar has intersected with Florida “middle America” culture and morphed into this. And it’s like $27 even at full dinner freight! A search of Boca Raton restaurants turns up numerous competing sushi buffets — who knew it was such a popular style down there?