Samba Restaurant @Venezia Mall

[Bobbie]

Has anyone eaten at the new Samba Brazilian Restaurant @The Venezia Mall?

[oakdale160]

I always find that sort of post suspicious!

[Dannie Boy]

I always find that sort of post suspicious!

If it were a first post i would agree, but it seems a perfectly harmless question to me.

[Bobbie]

Excuse me, oakdale160. We are going for first time today and taking 2 guests and I was hoping for some feedback, not a rude comment.

[bsdk1960]

Excuse me, oakdale160. We are going for first time today and taking 2 guests and I was hoping for some feedback, not a rude comment.

Well Bobbie you can expect that kind of answers from a few members who think there god themself,just ignore these wan..rs and keep posting,most in here is very nice peoble whowill help
if they can.

Have a nice day and please give us a report if you choose to try the restaurant.

[Frank Hovis]

I'm not quite sure what Brazilian food is?
Is it like Mexican or like Spanish/Portuguese or something completely different ?

[BOZ]

Brazilian resturants in the states are Beef, pork, chicken and sausage servered like a buffet but they come to your table with large scewers of meat, you eat all you want... Plus they have Huge and varied salad bars... I am curious if this is what they have there.... All are quite pricey in the states, but very good for the meat eaters! Looking forward to the update on this place...

[Frank Hovis]

Found this, http://www.rodiziorico.com/content/menu/menu_o2.php, which seems to be very similar to what BOZ described. If they've got that at the Venezia that would be excellent, but hopefully a little cheaper than 1200 baht per person.

[BOZ]

That is the going rate in the states on the low end, up to 2000baht so pricey, but if quality is there it would be worth the occasional visit for sure.... Thanks for the link!!!

[Bobbie]

Thank you, bsdk1960. I have been reading (not trolling) HH Forum for over 4 years to get info on Hua Hin and area prior to retiring here. We have lived here now 3 years, 7 months. Most of the time I have gotten info I was interested in or needed to know using the search feature & searching myself so I did not sign on as member & post until about a year ago. I have gotten a lot of useful information just by reading postings (excluding the grumpy & the bitter). When it was assumed I was trying to promote a new restaurant because I do not post a lot and received an immediate suspicious comment, it reminded me of why I waited so long to actually join so I could post.

We did go to Samba today and had excellent food, the meats, the salad, the veggies...all were awesome and plentiful. The staff were all friendly and helpful, explaining the menu, how to order, etc and bringing more food promptly. My son & his Thai friend came down from BKK and my husband and I live near the mall. We had an awesome, leisurely visit to celebrate with an early birthday meal for husband & son. We had a great time walking around the mall, doing a little shopping. It was packed with people today and it was so nice to see so many smiling happy faces. Hubby and I will definitely return to Samba and I am looking forward to Villa Market opening soon.

I just saw the comment that was posted while I was writing this. All the food is brought to your table. As many refills as you want, no time limit for eating. It is not buffet "American" style. So all this was a new experience for me. They offer a 12 meat or a 20 meat menu, which includes all the meat, veggies, salad & sauces you want. The prices are the same for lunch or dinner and are much cheaper here than in other countries. My son used to live in Korea and Lunch was $30 usd there. I saw online that Vietnam has a lot of Brazilian restaurants & they are around $30 usd for lunch, too. dinner more at both countries. I think the price for 12 meat here is 495 baht + vat & svc chg. They tell you the exact amount before you order. I usually avoid places that have the service charges, but this one was worth it. They have a couple of facebook pages if anyone wants more info.

[bsdk1960]

Sounds good Bobbie,will try it next time i'm in Hua Hin maybe november or april for sure,but must be hungry with all that meat,but i'm a meat lover so must try.

[BOZ]

Thank You Bobbie for the great review, I am looking forward to getting back over and checking this out first hand!!!!

[JW]

Nice one Bobbie, will go and try it soon. Cheers

[Frank Hovis]

I don't normally do food reviews but as I had asked what Brazilian food was earlier in this thread and had been buoyed up by looking at similar establishments on the internet I though I'd comment on my experience. I apologize in advance for the extreme length of the review but because it was such unfamiliar territory to me I thought I'd write the whole thing down. I wish now that I'd taken some photographs during the meal, if for no other reason than to save on typing.

Never having been to a Brazilian restaurant before I wasn't too sure what to expect but from perusing the internet I had in my mind that we would be presented with twelve different meats and we'd be able to choose which one's we wanted and how much of it we wanted.

As it's an all-you-can-eat deal I thought that once I'd consumed my first 'load' if I was still hungry I'd be able to get the twelve meats back to the table and I'd be able to choose another great pile of meat. Sort of like a Sunday carvery type thing where you can make a 1:5000 scale model of Mount Vesuvius out of roast beef, roast lamb, roast turkey, roast spuds and gravy.

The restaurant is very well decorated and laid out and everything was clean and new, the cutlery was nice and heavy and the whole place had an upmarket feel to it.
We chose the Silver menu which consists of 12 meats for 495 baht. We got a couple of large beers and two soft drinks. They were served promptly and at the same time some salad, french fries and dips were brought to the table and almost immediately, our first meat came to the table.
It was a skewer with chicken wings on it, the wings were not the 'buffalo wing' part of the wing, they were the next section down the part with two bones in it. We all asked for a demi-wing each. We sat there waiting for the next meat to come but it didn't. My demi-wing was crying out to be eaten, if for no other reason than to make the large white plate in front me tidy again; so I picked it clean in a matter of seconds and everyone else followed suit. My plate was now empty again save for two little chicken bones at the side.
Our next meat arrived at the table, I think it was pork in honey. The server sliced it off the skewer and gave us one sliver each; there was probably only six slivers worth on the skewer so he took a little bit back to the kitchen. I felt sorry for the little four inch long sliver of pork, as he sat alone on my plate weeping little tears of honey from his outer edges so to save him from a world of loneliness I wolfed him down in a single bite and he was very, very, tasty. My plate was empty again save the demi-wing remnants and a few tears of honey.
In a few minutes our server returned with another meat, except this meat was one I'd never heard of before, it was roast vegetables. Resisting the temptation to ask what animal this particular meat came from I accepted the roast vegetables and was given a few slices of roast bell pepper, green, red and yellow, some roast onion, roast cucumber and roast eggplant. The roast onions were pleasant enough but there's something inherently wrong with eating just roast onions, the other vegetables sacrificed themselves merely to make my plate look less desolate, at least the demi-wing bones finally had some company.
The next meat came, it was squid which to me isn't meat but I suppose it is really, it wasn't a problem as my fellow diners accepted the offer of a few small circles of squid which they said was nice and tasty. As I hadn't gotten any 'meat' this time round the roast peppers started to look quite appetizing and for reasons I can't quite remember I managed to eat all the roast peppers and more bizarrely, the roast cucumber; I drew the line at the eggplant, whether that was because I don't like eggplant (although that didn't stop the cucumber going down) or whether it was because I didn't want my plate to resemble an aerial photo of the arctic again I'm not sure.

By now I had realized that my hopes of having enough enough meat on my plate to be able to reconstitute it into a half-cow / half-pig / half-lamb hybrid the size of a Shetland Pony had been cruelly dashed against the rock of sanitized 'rodizio' food presentation so I changed my approach to the whole thing.

The server bought us a nice looking 'joint' of beef, again we all wantonly requested to have some and he sliced us each a sliver, there was enough meat left on the skewer for two or three more slivers so I asked for another, which he duly cut. I then asked the children if they wanted another sliver (in the manner of 'say you want another sliver whether you do or not'), and so two more slivers were cut and there really wasn't much left on the skewer.
At last! My plate looked like it held a meal fit for an anorexic dwarf who enjoyed extreme dieting; four slivers of beef, demi-wing bones and two roundels of roast eggplant.
The new tactic worked well as each meat was brought to the table we got almost everything off the skewer. There were a number of very tasty beef meats and a few nice pork ones too, sadly no lamb in the Silver menu. I'm not sure there was any in the more expensive menus either.

We reached our 12 meat limit and the server flipped our 'red & green I'm hungry indicator mat' to red and this gave us pause for thought, although there had been no shortage of time between meats to discuss things.
At this point the smaller members of our group said they were becoming full. We discussed which meats were the nicest; the demi-wings, the honey pork and the signature beef came out top. We decide to check if we'd have to plough through the 12 meats in the same order again which we found, to our delight, that we didn't.
Honey pork please. This time there was less competition and more slivers for the adults, Signature Beef, again more slivers, another different beef and soon we too were getting full.
To me, all-you-can-eat restaurants aren't a challenge, I eat until I'm full and then I stop so we flipped our 'red & green hungry indicator to red' and sat back contented. If you can force more in I guess you could sit there all day.

We all agreed we'd had enough and asked for the bill. For four of us on the Silver menu, two large bottles of beer and two soft drinks the total including VAT and service charge was very nearly three thousand baht.


Overall.
The ambiance was very nice; you can look out at all the people wandering around, watch gondolas punt up and down the canal and generally take in the architecture of faux Venice, which if you look up is quite nice.
I was disappointed in the serving method, I would much have preferred all twelve meats (ten if you discount the vegetable and squid 'meats') to be served at the same time or at least five then five so that I had something on my plate to look at while chewing. Things really only got better when we moved into the 'all-you-can-eat' phase when we could choose which meats we wanted.
The food was really very nice, even the squid was nice I was told, but I always felt that the empty plate in front of me was somehow mocking me for imagining that I was going to need step ladders to get to the top of my meat feast.
When we were there it was almost empty, that may have been an issue, I presume when it's busy all meats are available all at once, they are not cooking one small joint for one table and that might enable you to easily ask for another particular type of meat.

Would we go back?
It's funny, my wife says 'No' but that's almost entirely based on having to put up with the walking dead from Bangkok going round Venezia being controlled by their iPads so her 'No' is actually a 'No' to Venezia; at least on the weekend.
The smaller members of our party thought it was a novel way to eat and they actually enjoyed not having a pile of food on their plate as there was no pressure to 'eat it all up' and would happily go back.
I'm torn, I really enjoyed some of the meats but you do have to wade through some less interesting meats to get to the ones you like. Perhaps I've been conditioned to see an entire meal either on my plate or on a number of plates for me to pick and choose from but I really felt uncomfortable having tiny bits of food on my plate for mere seconds. There was also a novelty in the serving method but I think that had worn off by meat six or seven. It is a nice restaurant, well laid out, clean, tidy and with attentive staff who speak English reasonably well. I'd go back if all my twelve meats were the honey pork and a couple of beef cuts and they just left the entire joint on my plate and gave me a carving knife.

In short, which only makes the entire thing longer, a nice place, attentive staff, tasty food, relatively expensive, sizable portions (eventually), very odd serving technique.

Next week, a thousand word essay on the perils of becoming addicted to roast cucumber.

[Ropes]

Thanks Frank a really enjoyable read and at one point I was almost willing you to eat the eggplant.
Next time eh?