Pan Asie Restaurant

After i went back to see the pictures i used for my posts of japanese food in sydney, I began to realise just how much i really need that same type of japanese food. It was one of those days when i got lost and stumbled upon an all you can eat, japanese restaurant. Before i go on to even mention the name of the restaurant, the place is actually not a 100% japanese restaurant. It is run by chinese people, and has two menus, with one being the “a la carte chinese food menu” and the other the japanese all you can eat buffet.

The name of the restaurant is pan asie and it is located in the latin quarter. To be precise, the address of the restaurant is 13 rue saint severin, located in the fifth arrondissement of paris. The restaurant is surrounded by many other restaurants, which are mostly french and which serve things that tourists would like to get like escargot snails, frog legs and of course, the king of all cheese meals, melting pot of fondue. There are also a few kebab places in this area which serve kebab meat and dishes from the grill with french fries and salad.

If you want to go for the really safe options, there is a burger place called frog burger which serves "the best burgers" they can possibly make, but the price for some of their burgers are a bit higher than, let's say, our good friend mcdonald's. Their cheeseburger includes 100% french beef meat, cheddar cheese, ice berg lettuce, red onions, pickles and their barbecue sauce and it will cost you €11. 00. I have no idea if french fries are included in this price, but if you're keen on checking out their full menu as well as their "burger of the week" then i would recommend to check out their web page - the link is just at the bottom of the post as usual. The restaurants in this area are generally quite cheap, with menu items priced around €10. 00 or just a little bit more. I cannot say whether the quality of the meals is as good as their price... Maybe one of us can write a post about it?

If you would like to stay within the expected, then just head over to mcdonald's at the beginning of rue de la harpe. This is also where you will find the cluny - la sorbonne metro station, which is line 10, the yellow one. There are also connections from the rer train station, as well as another metro station, saint-michel within almost equal distance to the restaurant. With such easily accessible location getting here shouldn't be of any problem. If you have read my posts about maison larnicol for delicious little kouig-amanns and macarons, as well as patisserie sud tunisien for really good, sweet treats from that region of the world, then you're lucky, because pan asie is literally a few steps away.

You won't need a booking for this place as it is very casual and relaxed. It's like one of those asian eateries that you could easily find in every single arrondissement of paris, where you are greeted with a massive display window with the food trays showing you the specials of the day. This is what they refer to as the chinese menu a la carte. You can choose from any of the dishes and create any combination of your choice. If going through this whole decision making process is a bit too much to ask for on an empty stomach (it's okay, I understand), then they do have set menus which offer selected dishes for a specific price. All you need to do, is just to point to the option that you think will do the trick for you, and they will heat up the food, and bring it over to your table.

For example, you can see below their set menus:

One of the cheaper options, if not the cheapest, would be their daily €5. 90 menu, which consists of a main course, rice or noodles, and dessert. This is definitely one of the cheapest meals you can get in this area, apart from those one euro things they sell at mcdonald's. As you can see, some of their chinese dishes include chicken with basil, pork in sweet and sour sauce and chicken with a spicy sauce and chicken with black mushrooms. I know that the names are not very creative, but the good thing about this place and other similar ones is that you know exactly what you're ordering. You do have the display window right in front of you, so rather than looking at the menu and squinting your eyes to see the ingredients, you can easily just look through the glass window and point. The are two types of desserts which probably change every once in a while, so it's hard to predict what will be available on a specific day.

The next option you may choose for your meal is their €7. 90 option, which allows you to choose from a starter, a main course, rice or noodles and either a drink or a dessert of your choice. With this, you will have the liberty to choose from one of the presented starter menus, which are three pieces of their shrimp raviolis, three small chicken spring rolls (deep-fried), beef samosa and vegetarian spring rolls. as for the main course, you can choose from a bunch of dishes, which include for example fish. One of the fish dishes that they are proud to serve is their fish fillet with ginger and chive.

The other option you could choose from is just one euro more expensive for €8. 90. this option gives you the same options the previous one, but with two more sophisticated main courses to choose from, which are roasted duck or shrimps in a spicy sauce.

If you do not fancy any of these, you might want to settle for their dumplings menu with six pieces of dumplings either made with rice or noodles. In case you're interested, this set is for €6. 50.

I can't comment on their chinese menu since i went for the full-on, hardcore, excessive version of their japanese all you can eat buffet menu. And this is where the interesting part comes in... As i was there with another japanese food lover just like myself, we were prepared to face an all you can eat meal that is far from the actual taste of real japanese food. i mean, it's just difficult to find the authentic japanese food here in pairs. For instance, I have had a few meals on the famous japanese street, rue saint anne, and was disappointed so many times when i had to face this modified japanese food. It was even worse when i managed to find a real japanese place, run by japanese people, both in the kitchen and in the dining room, where it turned out the food was also adapted and modified to attract western tastes, which something that i really cannot understand. Does it even make sense to go get some yakitori, only to see cheese wrapped in beef slices on the menu?

With this mentality, we were prepared to feast after a long day of work. It is important to just take the food as it is and try not to be too judgemental. We started off with the usual, but before i go on to that, here is how the ordering deal works. the waitress gave us the menu, as well as a paper and a pen. The items on the menu had codes next to them and a little explanation of how many pieces was one portion. Make sure that if you want two pieces of sushi, you only write down the portion quantity as ''one'', because if you write ''two'' you will get the portion twice.

As i have mentioned, we went ahead and started off with a bowl of miso soup each, as well as some sushi. we ordered four pieces of salmon sushi, four more of tuna sushi, and something a little bit different, their california tobiko rolls, which were four more pieces. The california roll in was sprinkled with orange and was quite nice.

Regardless of what some of the people may have said on trip advisor about the poor quality of the sushi, I must say that my visit to pan asie did not correspond with what has been said there. And again, I could consider myself a good japanese food eater after the time i had spent japan, but i really saw nothing majorly wrong with the sushi they served. The trip advisor comments regarding the sushi in particular are quite harsh, but maybe we were there on a good day.

The sushi came also with some wasabi and pickled ginger on the side, which is very thoughtful because some people, like me, would rather have wasabi on the side rather than have it brush on to the rice by the chef. This brings me to the the next point: the rice. the rice was cooked quite well with just the right amount of vinegar to make it nice. Again this is different when you're eating in japan, but for something here in paris in this sort of area, this was very well done.

After the miso soup and the sushi, we also got some entries from their grill section, which here in paris is basically the equivalent of the yakitori menu of most restaurants. For the first round, we ordered some grilled chicken as well as the grilled chicken wings. Both chicken dishes were not too bad and were nicely seasoned. The best part was thesweet, teriyaki-like sauce that was brushed over the chicken as it finished cooking. If you still find that the chicken needs more seasoning, you also have sweet soya sauce on the side to be used as you please.

We moved along the whole meal quite nicely, as we were super hungry. Next up, we both agreed to get something different from the first round and we ordered different variations of sushi, which this time were a bowl of rice topped with black and white sesame seeds and five slices of salmon, the exact same tobiko sushi with more fish on top, and then for something else that is very french: sushi with salmon and a slice of cream cheese. The menu says it's salmon and cheese but i'm sure that the cheese used was cream cheese. This is not difficult to imagine since cream cheese is often used with salmon in other dishes, so the balance in the taste was there. It was quite nice actually, but we just got a piece each since there were better things out there than salmon and cream cheese in an asian restaurant.

With all the carbohydrates, we also needed some meat to balance this out. Again we stuck to our strategy of ordering something new, so we chose to get the grilled cheese wrapped in beef, which i criticised earlier, as well as minced chicken meatballs and fish cake, which came in the shape of balls as well. I had no complaints about the taste here, as everything was fine. The cheese and grilled beef was good, but nothing spectacular. The cheese could have been cooked a bit longer for that melting effect, but it did the job. The minced chicken meatballs were not even close to japanese food, but they were really good in their own way. the spices were nicely combined with vegetables and with the chicken and all of that came out as a nice barbecue skewer. The fish cakes were also really nice, as they were freshly made and deep-fried. the dipping sauce that came for these fish cakes was their sweet-chilli sauce, which is very common for grilled dishes in thailand and other nearby countries.

After round number one and round number two, we were quite satisfied. One thing about the ordering is that the food will take some time to get to your table. This is an all you can eat concept that it is based on: the items are being prepared as per the order which results in only freshly made dishes, rather than dishes that have been prepared hours before and are just sitting there on the display. By saying this, I would give at least five minutes for the rice-based dishes like sushi and fried rice, and about ten to fifteen minutes for the grilled items and the deep-fried items to arrive to the table.

i think the pauses for the food preparation gave us time to soak in the food and digest a little bit. many times in all you can eat situations, people tend to go full on, face first, and straight into the action and only stop when they begin to feel full. This can be avoided thanks to the food preparation time taken by the kitchen, which are nice little breaks for us, the consumers. The thing is that we didn't stop there.

We got one last order (i promise) which was a bowl of rice to share. By the way, the rice bowls here are quite small and you could finish it in about seven bites. the rice that we got is the same rice as the sushi rice, slightly seasoned with vinegar. The rice bowl is then topped up with cubes of salmon, as well as some avocado and then again sprinkled with white and black sesame seeds. We also got some grilled items for one last push, and this time we already knew what to order. We got more of the grilled chicken that we enjoyed during the first round, as well as the delicious chicken meatballs that we dipped in what was left of the sweet-chilli sauce from the fish cakes. Along with that, we also ordered some fried chicken, which looked completely different from those on the menu. The chicken we received was way smaller, but the taste was still not too bad.

This brings me to another point worth discussing: the actual menu item versus what is presented in the menu with the pictures. Since this is an all you can eat restaurant, they tend to be very generous with the rice they use when putting a piece of sushi together. I felt that the sushi look quite chubby in size, but we were not to fall for this classic trick. As for the tobiko rolls, we realised that the salmon meat and avocado that should make for the heart of the sushi are quite skinny. In what we got for our second round, they were actually so small that they might as well have not been there. Other than that, the rice bowl topped up with five slices of salmon was also super misleading. Fair play to them, they did write below the picture that you will only get five slices of the salmon, as opposed to about twenty which you could see in the picture.

In defence to the comments on trip advisor in regards to the staff, I think that they were fine. Although they don't smile too much nor speak softly, this is nothing that you would expect in an asian restaurant, unfortunately. I do not mean to be offensive and i am speaking solely from my own experience since i am also of an asian origin. What i will say though, is that the staff was very attentive and were efficient. there was a time that the waitress forgot my miso soup, but the reaction and recovery was good. In any case, they work hard and will come to collect your order within two minutes, which is not bad considering that only two people cover the whole floor.

Another risk that we took when we got to this place was the usual food smell that would stick to our clothes the minute you step into the restaurant. This was actually the very first thing i looked out for after i had opened the door, since personally, I hate it when my clothes and hair smell like i have been in the kitchen all day. This was quite big risk considering that i had to go to work after this, but it was a risk worth taking. We were lucky, as there was no smell. This was very surprising since the kitchen is literally three meters from the nearest table and that the only thing separating the kitchen from the dining room is a curtain. They must have a good ventilation system inside, which saved us a great amount of stress and frustration.

And lastly, I would like to say that the value for money here is fantastic. adults would pay €12. 80 for an all you can eat lunch and the same price also applies for dinner! there is a similar asian buffet place next to my house and they have about five different prices for the time of the day and the week, so lunch would be one price and the dinner another, weekend another. But here, it's €12 80 for both lunch and dinner, which i find quite good.

In addition to this basic rate, you could also choose to add €5. 00 and get some "exclusive items" on the menu, which are basically more choices of salmon based dishes. We saw no need to pay €5. 00 euros extra, since the available options are already more than enough for a person.

In addition to the basic rate and the five euros that you may or may not want to pay, there is also a two euros fine if you waste food! which is written somewhere on the menu, so if your eyes are bigger than your stomach and you really order way more than you can eat, you will have to pay the fine for this wasted food. I know that two euros is not a massive amount, but idea here is to avoid wasting food.

All in all, the restaurant is clean and has a decent-size seating area. The staff is also quite nice as well as food, despite some rough words from the community on trip advisor. I would recommend that you give this place a try, or at least try one of their normal set menus first.

pan asie all you can eat restaurant saint-michel - rating:

Accessibility - 10/10

Price - 9/10

Selection - 8. 5/10

Staff friendliness - 7/10

Cleanliness - 8/10

Atmosphere - 8/10

overall - 8. 5/10

trip advisor comments on pan asie saint-michel

frog burger france - menu and information

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