Eighteen ninety five. That is the weekday lunch price for all you can eat at Ichiyami Buffet & Sushi, at 145 SE Mizner Blvd in the middle of Royal Palm Place in downtown Boca Raton. Not a lunch special or a shortened roll list, but the full buffet, and their menu page is headed "Over 200 Fresh Items" for a reason.

There is one thing to know before you go, and it is buried on their own site. Last seating for lunch is 3:30, but the kitchen, the sushi bar and the hibachi station all shut down at 3:30, and everything is cleared away at 4:10 so they can reset for dinner. Show up at 3:15 and you are technically on time and practically too late.

What You're Actually Eating

Lunch is the sushi and the kitchen. Nigiri comes out as salmon, tuna, escolar, tilapia, wahoo, shrimp, krab, tamago and masago, and there are roughly two dozen rolls in rotation, including the Lion King, the Red Dragon, the Dancing Eel, the Rainbow, the Plantain and a Florida roll. The cold side has octopus salad, calamari salad, conch with mango salsa, scallop ceviche and seaweed salad. From the kitchen you get General Tso's chicken, salt and pepper calamari, salt and pepper shrimp, Mongolian beef, shrimp shumai, krab rangoon, pan fried pork dumplings and steamed flounder, plus cocktail shrimp and mussels on the cold bar.

The hibachi station is the part most people underrate. You pick steak, chicken or shrimp with vegetables and noodles and it gets cooked in front of you on the flat top, which is why regulars on Nextdoor describe it as a Mongolian barbecue setup rather than a warming tray.

Dinner is a genuinely different buffet, and this is what the extra money buys. Snow crab, oysters and peel and eat shrimp appear only at dinner. So does the sashimi board with seared wahoo, seared sesame tuna, yellowtail and steak tataki, along with a lobster roll and a seabass roll. The kitchen changes too, adding jumbo butter shrimp, coconut shrimp, Szechuan crawfish, baked creamy salmon, BBQ ribs and steak wrapped asparagus. Whole baked salmon runs on weekends only.

Save room, because the dessert table is the sleeper. Panna cotta, creme brulee, tiramisu, flan, chocolate mousse, cream puffs, cheesecake, Napoleon, brownies, fresh watermelon and pineapple, and San Bernardo ice cream in eight flavors. One thing to keep in mind: their site notes that not everything is out at the same time and the menu changes without notice, so treat the list as the shape of the spread rather than a guarantee.

The Insider Move

If you are here for volume and not for crab legs, take the Monday through Friday lunch seat. It opens at 11:30 am, costs $18.95 for adults, and it is the cheapest door into the building. Weekend lunch is two dollars more and does not start until noon. Weekday dinner is twelve dollars more than weekday lunch, and Sunday dinner is the priciest seat of all at $32.95, which catches people off guard because they assume Sunday is a slow night.

Aim to sit down by 2:45 at the latest, and closer to 12:30 if you can. The 4:10 cleanup means the last hour of the window is a fading line, and the two hour maximum dining time is posted on their site, so an early seat also gives you the full run of it. At dinner the equivalent rule is the last call for food, which is 10:00 on weeknights and 10:30 on Friday and Saturday.

Bringing a crowd? A 15% gratuity is added automatically to any party of eight or more. Say it out loud before the check lands and nobody debates it in the parking lot. Speaking of which, reviewers consistently flag Royal Palm Place parking as the hardest part of the visit, so give yourself an extra ten minutes at peak hours.

What People Are Saying

This is not a new discovery, it is a long-running local habit. Yelp is sitting near a thousand reviews, Restaurantji has over 600, and the restaurant's Facebook page shows 96% of roughly 1,300 reviewers recommending it. On Yelp the single most photographed and discussed item is the oysters, followed by the panna cotta, the wonton soup, the spicy tuna roll and the octopus.

The recurring praise in review roundups is the sheer range and the freshness, with the hibachi station and the dessert spread named again and again. A Tripadvisor regular who meets friends here from Coral Springs described being handed garlic butter for the crab legs on arrival and rated the hot and sour soup, the spare ribs and the large cocktail shrimp. The honest counterweight, also from review summaries, is that the sushi is not as refined as a dedicated sushi bar, the front desk can be brisk, and the room gets busy enough that a wait for a table is normal at peak hours. For $18.95 at lunch, most people appear to consider that a fair trade.

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