I had diarrhea for the past few days and after days of having lack of appetite and eating nothing but half a sandwich and a carrot, I was finally feeling back to normal. And starved I was! So, what does a hungry girl supposed to do?

All you can eat Korean BBQ, of course!

Hon Wo has several branches around Hong Kong including this branch in Causeway Bay. I've been to other Korean all you can eat BBQ but this one is actually quite decent. Place is clean and tidy. Seating is comfortable and spacious. Variety of food is abundant and always refilled. Service is efficient and helpful. They replace the BBQ plate when asked! Not only is there a variety of BBQ meat (from pork, chicken, beef and seafood) but they have sushi rolls, salmon sashimi, dessert, snacks and other buffet items. Ice cream and all you can drink soy milk is available. I saw they even have lettuce leaves for those that like to wrap their meat like Koreans do with a hot soybean paste sauce that looked pretty good but I didn't try as I feared it would be too spicy. Price? $178 for weekends, $158 for weekdays. Cheaper on after 9:30 PM and before 7 PM.I always return when have a craving for gluttony.

I met a few friends for dinner at Hon Wo on a Thursday night. I don't know how regular this is, but they had a buy 2 beers get 1 beer free special (also for sodas). They bring the beer along in an ice bucket to keep it cold-- I'm a fan of little touches like that.It's a buffet, so that means good and bad. Good: large selection, as much as you want. Bad: inconsistent and sometimes low quality. Pretty much everything that's not meat here I wouldn't recommend. I grabbed some dumplings: they were cold, they were hard (!?), definitely not worth the space they took up in my belly. Pretty much the same goes for all the little appetizers and sides: fried crab: cold and soggy; fried fish skin: cold and chewy; french fries: cold and hard and dry. I of course knew it would be like that, but I tried some anyway just to confirm for you, reading at home, that yes, you should avoid this stuff.

The banchan is different. I do recommend it, though it is only OK. Hey, you need something besides meat in your belly. The kimchi is acceptable, but far too fresh for my tastes: I like it nicely fermented, a little stanky, and a lot spicy. This was rather plain but it didn't stop me from eating a lot of it.As for the barbeque: nothing blew me away, but it was all good. The beef was lacking that distinctive bulgogi flavor (I don't know what that is), but it was nicely marinated and very flavorful still. Perhaps a little fatty. They have two kinds of spicy pork; I grabbed the spicy pork chop, but I wouldn't recommend that b/c it has bones. It's good pork, but definitely not spicy (although they have some chopped chilis at the buffet that are very spicy, and worth adding to your lettuce rolls if you're a freak like me). The squid cooked up without being chewy. The mutton stood out as a favorite.

My mother lived in Korea for a while and growing up we'd eat at the little Korean place by the military base once a month or so. There's a special place in my culinary heart for banchan, yakimandoo, grilled meat, and sticky rice. I think to get the best stuff, buffet is not the way to go. But I will say this place is entirely serviceable. C+ or B-.