A Ritzy New Japanese Barbecue Spot Revels in All-You-Can-Eat Beef and Sushi
The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.
The South Bay’s newest all-you-can-eat restaurant is situated in a Milpitas strip mall, in a big, airy space that until recently housed a Red Lobster. (It still looks like one from the outside.) Unlike its predecessor, though, Sea Wagyu House promises extravagant delights from both the land and the sea. Which is to say diners can indulge in as much Japanese yakiniku-style grilled wagyu beef as they care to eat. And they can feast on unlimited nigiri and sashimi from a well-stocked sushi buffet.
And the place stays open until 1 o’clock in the morning every night.
This is what ultimately brought us here at 9:30 p.m. on a recent Friday, having snagged a late reservation to bypass the two-hour-long Yelp waiting list. Inside, the restaurant has been done up in a modern, vaguely nightclub-esque style, with lots of streaked black marble and faux pyrotechnics, and a staff of attractive Asian American twentysomethings dressed in all black to match.
Savvy diners will quickly clock that Sea Wagyu House is a pretty blatant clone of the Chubby Cattle conglomerate’s growing empire of upscale AYCE wagyu spots, right down to the 90-minute time limit for your meal and the “silver,” “gold” and “diamond” tier levels on the menu. (An ungenerous reviewer might call it a cut-rate version, as each tier is priced $10 to $20 cheaper.) Sea Wagyu isn’t even the only copycat in Milpitas, where a location of Chubby Cattle proper is also slated to open soon.
Who knows who will emerge victorious in the coming wagyu buffet wars? The only thing clear is that piles of endless wagyu seem to be the restaurant format of choice for today’s cash-flush Asian American Millennials and Gen Z-ers.
But even if the concept behind Sea Wagyu House isn’t original, the restaurant does have its own unique charms that set it apart from the crowd. One of the most notable is the sushi selection, which to be clear, isn’t necessarily premium omakase-counter quality. But the fish is fresher and more interestingly varied than what you’d find at most sushi buffets. I loaded up on two rounds of just sashimi — velvety escolar dotted with chili crisp, buttery slices of hamachi, and some other delicate, pink-fleshed fish I didn’t recognize that came garnished with jalapeño and microgreens.
The rest of the buffet counter is mostly dedicated to items meant to enhance your barbecue experience. There is an excellent sauce station, with a variety of premixed options highlighted by a refreshing, chile-spiked “house sauce” and a zippy green, cilantro-based number that paired especially well with seafood. And there are radish slices, lettuce leaves and surprisingly excellent kimchi, for diners who like to fold their meat into Korean-style lettuce wraps.
But the centerpiece of the Sea Wagyu experience is the grill-your-own barbecue spread, which itself is an abundant array of both meat and seafood — with additional luxury ingredients added for each higher price point. The $45 silver tier, for instance, doesn’t come with any actual wagyu, while the $75 diamond tier is bloated with unnecessarily extravagant items like abalone and caviar that didn’t even make sense to us in a barbecue context.
For us, the $58 gold tier felt like the Goldilocks level, as it came with all of the premium cuts we wound up enjoying the most. Even at this level, you get an unlimited supply of six different cuts of wagyu, including the ribeye cap, the chuck eye and the beef “toro” — all thin cuts that sizzled and often burst into flame on the hot wire grill. Every cut was delicious, though at a certain point the wagyu all started to taste the same, just varying levels of buttery and rich. One standout was the wagyu flat iron, which was exquisitely tender with a robust, beefy flavor.
Our other favorites weren’t wagyu cuts at all, but rather the bone-in short rib (cut off the bone, actually, and rolled up into a coil) and the rib finger. These were the thickest, steakiest cuts. Seasoned with just salt and pepper, each piece burst with meaty juices when we bit in and was delicious even without any sauce.
On the seafood side, we especially loved the generous portion of uncommonly fresh and juicy live clams (part of the “Dragon Seafood Tower,” which during our visit just came on a normal plate), which popped open after a few minutes on the grill. And after our server saw how much we enjoyed the sea snails (a favorite of the restaurant’s Vietnamese clientele), she brought us another huge plate of them that she’d already dug out from their shells ahead of time, so we could savor their earthy umami unencumbered.
For all of the restaurant’s astonishing abundance, there were a handful of aspects that felt a little bit ungenerous. Unlike some of the other buffets at this price point, no drinks were included in any of the tiers, and the fountain sodas didn’t even come with free refills. (As the Diet Coke fiends in our party racked up a $15 soda bill, I couldn’t help but think of the all-you-can-drink milk tea I’d enjoyed at a local competitor.) And the only dessert option to speak of was a rather paltry selection of limp fruit crepes.
If we are being real about it, though, no one is eating at an AYCE wagyu spot for the drinks or desserts. And halfway through our meal at Sea Wagyu, we started to really get the hang of how to best enjoy ourselves. We learned that none of the wide selection of (mostly carb-heavy) hot appetizers were worth the stomach space except the bone broth, which made for a wonderful palate cleanser. The mushroom soup wasn’t bad either.
Mostly, though, what we learned was that our friendly server was far, far more competent than we could ever dream of being. That baby octopus I bit into that was still soft and watery inside? It wasn’t even close to finished. Later, I ate one that she had grilled and it was sublime, with a tender bite and a subtle smoky flavor. After that we let her handle all of the seafood — the scallops, the oysters, the wonderfully crackly-shelled head-on shrimp.
By the time 10 o’clock rolled around, we’d basically given up on grilling the meats on our own. Every cut she grilled tasted twice as good as the ones we’d tried to manage ourselves. We sat back and focused on eating. We let her cook.
Sea Wagyu House is open Monday through Friday, 5 p.m.–1 a.m., and Saturday and Sunday, noon–1 a.m., at 503 E. Calaveras Blvd. in Milpitas. Last seating is at 12:30 a.m.