My dad won one of those buy one get one free dinners at iCook Buffet from those scratch cards they have in the Chinese newspapers (it’s like playing the lottery, with a bonus newspaper consolation prize), so Pauline and I went to take advantage of the deal on Monday. We arrived at around 7:30, which I guess wasn’t prime dinner time; plus it was raining so I guess that explains why the place was dead.

iCook is a twist on traditional hot pot in that you have to go up and get your own ingredients, sauces, spices and drinks. In a way, it’s also like Mongolian Grill but you have to hot pot the food yourselves. The menu itself was kind of confusing, because they didn’t tell you how much or what the buffet is, they only listed various premium soup bases for $3.99+. Later on, a mixed couple came in, sat near us and were mega confused about what’s happening. Apparently the deal is that you get the buffet (i.e. $14.99) and then you could pick a premium soup base or get a generic base. We ended up ordering 2 premium soup bases which was dumb. They don’t mention that you can get a generic soup base on the menu.

So it was off to pick up ingredients. They had the usual stuff including mussels, shrimp and a million different type of (sea creature) balls. The good thing is that because it’s self-serve, you don’t have to wait for the waiter to bring back the huge plate of meat you ordered. Everything was fine and dandy until it came time to pay our bill.

First of all, it wasn’t really much of a “deal” as our bill came up to $28.12 including a mandatory 10% tip. I tried to pay with my Mastercard, and after 10 minutes of waiting for them to pick up the bill and process it, they came back saying that my card was not approved. Hrmm, I was no where near my credit limit and had used it successfully over the weekend. Maybe there was some credit card fraud that I didn’t know about, but I’ll check it out later. I was skeptical about being “not approved”, so I gave them my Visa to try.

Now, I was positive that this Visa would work, because I hadn’t used it since before I went to France, and there had been no weird items on my statements since then; in fact there had been nothing at all on my statements since then. So after 10 minutes of waiting for them to pick up the bill and process it (many servers walked passed us, but none of them picked it up — it wasn’t like the place was busy though), they came back to me and said my card was not approved.

Hmm, something fishy going on? So I made Pauline try her Visa and it went through and we paid. Weird eh? Maybe their POS wouldn’t take my cards, but my pet theory is that they wanted us to pay cash. Just to test out my theory, we went over to Shoppers (omg they’re everywhere) afterwards and bought some candy. I paid using my Mastercard and guess what, it worked. Surprise! I went home to check the balance on my Visa and it was at $0 with full credit. Surprise!

So was it a scam? I don’t know, but it’s definitely weird that neither my Mastercard or Visa worked on their system. It wasn’t like we were being cheap, we could’ve gotten normal soups and only paid $18ish.

This was the 2nd time I’ve been there too, the last time for dim sum. Although it was also a buffet, they brought us a lot of (carby, filling) stuff we didn’t order, and it ended up being a lot of food. Good thing I wasn’t a lightweight, otherwise maybe they would try some scam saying that you didn’t finish all your food so we have to charge you extra.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: diary, food, restaurants, scam