Tanked on teppanyaki

All-you-can-eat Teppanyaki IS the future. For those who aren't familiar with fashionable eating fads, Teppanyaki is a style of Japanese cuisine that uses a Teppan, a flat iron griddle to cook food. In Teppanyaki restaurants you sit around the griddle and watch the chef cook for you, which is a spectacle in itself. All-you-can-eat Teppanyaki takes it one step further.

The concept is simple. You pay 150 yuan each (about 15 pounds), they hand you a menu and you can eat and drink whatever you want from it all night. How they make money when a troop of fifteen hungry and very thirsty Westerners turn up on a Saturday night birthday party is beyond me. Which is exactly what we did. The chef must have seen us coming and wanted to run a mile. For the next 4 hours he cooked whatever we desired; steak, lamb chops, kebabs, squid, prawns, sushi, a host of vegetables, noodles and rice. And then there was the drink, endless amounts of sake, beer, wine, and as much coconut juice as I could force down myself.

As my obsession with food has developed, I've become quite sceptical about these all-you-can-eat establishments, believing that the food cannot surely be of a high quality for restauranteurs to justify serving these mammoth portions to people. But I've been to three of these Teppanyaki restaurants since I've arrived in China, and the quality in each has been of a pretty high standard. The sushi at this restaurant was its only downfall, it didn't seem very fresh and was falling apart, but everything else was spot on. The steak wonderfully flavoured and cooked to perfection, the squid not too chewy and nicely seasoned, the prawns juicy and moreish. And I could eat as much of it as I wanted, cooked right in front of my eyes.

As the night went on, the sake took hold, and all manner of antics replaced the rapid devourment of food. Highlights of the evening included a De Niro 'face off' between Dave and Luke, a arm wrestling competition between birthday boy Tom and one of the chefs, various homoerotic poses for the camera and much swooshing of a light saber.

I await the next Teppanyaki with huge anticipation.