Bucked Out Seafood Buffet @ Gobo Chit-Chat, Traders Hotel

I've heard great things about the Bucked Out Seafood Buffet (Festive Edition) @ Gobo Chit-Chat, Traders Hotel from the many bloggers' reviews I've read and had always wanted to try.  So, here I was with some friends in December.  I didn't plan to write a review of the buffet experience I had here but felt compelled to do so after my experience as I found out something I just had to share (hopefully it might be of some knowledge/benefit to some of my readers).

This bucked out seafood buffet I think started sometime in mid-2018 and I even read that people would start to line up at the entrance to get in even before the buffet is due to open.  I mentioned that to my friends though I wasn't convinced myself that there would be such a scenario seeing that the buffet has been around for quite some time now.  Nevertheless, we got there about 10 minutes after 6.30 pm (the official starting time)...and guess what?  There was indeed a queue...still! O_o  And yours truly was naive enough to walk right up to the counter and asked if we could go in first since we made reservations...and was politely told that everyone that's currently in queue had made prior reservations too...oops! >_<

By the time we finally got in (luckily the queue moved pretty quickly, so it was just about a 10-minute wait), I could see people making a beeline for the live mud crabs and attacking the seafood like there's no tomorrow (albeit in an orderly, not chaotic, fashion).  The mud crabs (being the most popular) disappeared really fast and they had to be replenished by the time we got to them! :O

So I grabbed two quickly and put them into a bucket....hence the name bucked out seafood.  You just grab whatever raw seafood you like and put it into a bucket together with your order number (that you'll find waiting for you at your table) and hand it over to be cooked (there's an assigned staff to handle the orders). You don't have to choose the sauce as the crabs are cooked in one way only.

Then we went on to fill another bucket with the rest of the seafood available and choose the sauce we want. You can have your pick of salted egg sauce, tom yum sauce, Sichuan chilli sauce, curry cheese sauce and Thai coriander lime garlic sauce (the choices for the day are found at the order counter, most of which happens to be spicy in nature)! :(  Besides mud crabs, the variety of seafood available includes:

Flower Crabs & Bamboo Clams

Slipper Lobsters, Freshwater Prawns & Tiger Prawns

Scallops, Black & Green Mussels

Yabbies

Clams

Also available was the seafood on ice for your immediate enjoyment while waiting for your seafood to be cooked and delivered to your table. 

Freshly Shucked Oysters

Steamed Baby Lobsters

Lightly steamed Flower Crabs & Prawns

Alaskan King Crab Legs (of course nothing like the size of the Alaskan king crabs you see in the series, Deadliest Catch...kekeke!).

I ended up enjoying the ready-to-eat seafood on ice the most (read on to find out why).  The oysters, prawns and king crab legs were fresh but not the baby lobsters as the meat turned out very mushy (I left that uneaten).  I liked the king crab legs enough to have a second helping.

Finally, our cooked-to-order live mud crabs arrived...and it's done only one way...as Chilli Crabs!  Although we took two crabs, I think we got back only one (!) as we found only two claws.  Even the "spaceship" (aka the top shell) of the crab was missing.  Not sure if it was deliberate (to give us less than what we ordered) or the orders got mixed up. >.<

The chilli crabs, served with fried mantou buns, were fresh (they're live crabs after all) and the sauce rather spicy...too spicy (if you ask me) until I can't really taste the crab.  The sauce felt a little thick and gooey as if the crabs had been coated in flour (and fried) giving the sauce its thick consistency.  You'll be given a pair of plastic gloves but no other tools to help with the messy eating of the crabs.  There's no crab mallet to hammer away at the claws, no seafood cracker to crack the shells nor seafood pick to scoop out the meat. You just have to pick apart the already cracked shells with your gloved hands...and, by the way, the low-quality plastic gloves are so thin, they crumple and puncture easily rendering them practically useless.  It's good for a one-time use only (maybe it won't even last one course of eating), so don't hope you can put them on again.  You'd be better off just using your hands. :>(  We ended up having only one plate of crabs (no seconds) coz 1) it was messy to eat and the gloves didn't help, 2) it was time consuming since we didn't have the proper utensils and 3) it didn't taste all that impressive anyway.

For our next bucket of all other seafood, we chose to have them cooked in Thai Coriander Lime Garlic Sauce which turned out to be my favourite of the three sauces we tried.  This sauce hits you with its fresh, tangy and slightly garlicky taste which went well with seafood but it also came with spicy (but tolerable) undertones.

As for the rest of the seafood, the prawns (both the freshwater and tiger prawns) were the freshest of the lot and the bamboo clams were nice.  The yabbies (meat was slightly mushy) and clams weren't all that fresh (almost all the clam meat were detached from their shells after cooking which is an indication of just how not fresh they were) but the scallops were the worst.

I went back to the seafood counters to collect another bucket of shellfish to be cooked another way.  And that was how I came to find out what I found out.

Well, the story goes like this....after I collected another round of seafood I had to wait for the assigned staff to take down my order number and choice of sauce (I was second in line).  But, lo and behold, he left the counter to take cooked seafood to waiting diners coz they were understaffed.  Actually, the queue wasn't very long, there were just four of us but he went away for so long (attending to customers, I'm assuming) that we were made to stand there for more than 10 minutes...for something that should have taken only a minute or two (the fourth person in queue left when he could wait no more).   So, while I was standing around waiting with nothing to do (while kinda fuming inside), my eyes were drawn to some cooking action behind the seafood counters.  It was then that I saw staff throwing buckets of seafood into pots of boiling water.  The blanched seafood is then fished out from the water and what seemed like the staff scooping sauce into the bucket which contains the parboiled seafood.  I think that was what I saw (I'm 100% sure I saw the seafood being boiled though I can't say I'm 100% sure it was the sauce that got ladled into the buckets).  By then, my turn came up and I left hurriedly to get back to my friends.  I didn't see how or where the chilli crabs were cooked though.

What really got me was the 'cooked to order' concept here which I clearly misunderstood.  Their 'cooked to order' simply meant seafood being blanched in hot water before tossing in sauce (and not cooked in a wok proper at a live cooking station).  No wonder the seafood tasted bland coz how much flavour can you infuse into them through blanching without tossing in sauce! >.<  I wish the reviews had been more specific on how the seafood was cooked.

Anyway, this was our second platter of Mixed Shellfish that contained mostly prawns (both freshwater and tiger prawns) and razor clams for obvious reasons.  We decided to leave out the scallops, yabbies and slipper lobsters and omitted the mussels too since most of us aren't fans of mussels.

We went with Salted Egg Sauce for this cook.  I could smell the salted egg when the platter arrived at the table, so that was a good sign.  The salted egg sauce tasted alright but I feel there was just not enough of it to coat the shellfish thoroughly and lusciously.  They didn't even trim the feelers which looked rather unsightly.

Now you know why I said (earlier) that I enjoyed the cold shellfish the most especially the king crab legs, prawns and oyster.  But before you overdose on seafood, there's also Roast Turkey which is a must-have in the tradition of Christmas...and there were three awaiting diners to sink their teeth in.

Don't like roast turkey?  How about Roast Beef then?  Two big slabs of roast beef sitting on a bed of roasted vegetables of asparagus, carrots and zucchini.

The roast beef was served with a delectable mushroom sauce and it turned out to be the other food item (besides the seafood on ice) that I had seconds as it was really tender and delicious.

Of course, like any buffet, there's a spread of other hot food available too (spanning Chinese, Malay and western cooking styles) for which I had no time for (coz devouring shellfish took a lot of time!) and few photos of.  I can't even remember what were there but I did see sushi, sashimi, tempura, grilled salmon head, salads, antipasto, noodle stations, pasta, steamed and baked whole fish, cheese board...and a lot more I didn't pay attention to (nor took photos of).

Some of the cakes, pastries and desserts on display...they were plentiful which my friends did attack....not me though, I didn't have nor want any.

Any more grouses?  Yeah, sure...I have a couple more.  The table-of-four we got (behind some glass partition), the seats were against the wall/partition so getting in and out was cumbersome (the one sitting on the outside needs to vacate her seat when the one on the inside needs to get out...haiz).  The table space was also too narrow and with the large metal tray (meant for the seafood) occupying most of the table space, there was hardly any space left to put a proper plate.  No plates were provided to hold the shells either (not that the table space had room for more plates), so we used the plates from the buffet but their smallish size couldn't contain the massive amount of shells.  In the end, we dumped them in the huge metal tray that the cooked seafood was poured onto.  Service was also slow in clearing plates as they were clearly understaffed to handle the massive crowd (you even have to squeeze pass tables on the way to the washroom).  The seafood counters smelled fishy mid-way through the buffet when I walked past which clearly indicated that not all the shellfish were fresh.  And when we left, we were shocked by the flat-rate parking of RM17 (don't park at Traders Hotel!).

After dinner, my friends wanted to adjourn somewhere for drinks, so we took the lift all the way to the 33rd floor of Traders Hotel's...but no, we didn't linger as I found the place too noisy for my liking + all the good seats were already taken.  If you've gotten one of the cabanas with full height windows, this would have been the stunning view that awaits you from their Rooftop Skybar (where this shot was taken).

We then walked all the way to KLCC to look for another place to drink and chat....and took some photos along the way.  P/S: This was the tree that was in my earlier trivia...hehe! ^_~

We realised most of the F&B outlets in KLCC were already closed by 11-ish or, if not, were on the verge of closing.  We did find one still open, Delirium, but were told that they'll be closing soon too...in half an hour, so we left as it made no sense to spend money to only sit for just half an hour.

All the night time photos you see here were taken by my friend....with her phone camera, of course...which was obviously much more canggih than mine! ;D

My Personal Opinion

If you're someone who can eat a crazy shitload of seafood and won't be overly critical of the taste or if the seafood isn't utterly fresh, then the price of RM159 for all-you-can-eat will certainly appeal to you.

But, if you're like me who eats a gentle amount and values flavour and freshness above all else, then this might not quite fit the bill.  Ultimately, the seafood tasted bland coz most of the flavour was probably lost in the poaching liquid.

In the end, the seafood buffet was underwhelming for me in many aspects but most of all for the lack of taste in the seafood itself.  I prefer to eat seafood that's really fresh, properly cooked (and flash-fried in a hot wok) together with its sauce to infuse flavour into the seafood and one that comes with the proper utensils for getting at them...and that means preferably from restaurants who are seafood specialists of some sort.

Well, we met....and we ate...but we did more chit-chatting at Gobo Chit-Chat Meet & Eat (what an appropriate name!) than eating...which is a good thing (I think!) as the promise of super fresh and tasty seafood from reviews didn't materialise.  Sometimes I wonder if the food we eat is of the same standard as those provided to food bloggers at invited reviews just to entice us.  In retrospect, I wish the reviews (that I relied upon) had been more forthcoming too with a better description of the cook-to-order concept.  It wasn't quite what I expected.  So, once was quite enough for me, thank you! >_<

Gobo Chit-Chat on Level 5
Traders Hotel Kuala Lumpur
Persiaran KLCC
Kuala Lumpur City Centre
50088 Kuala Lumpur
Tel: 03-2332 9888