UMI Hotpot Sushi & Seafood Buffet opened Aug. 21 at 1805 Walnut Street in Cary, North Carolina, bringing the rapidly expanding large-format buffet brand to the Triangle for the first time.
UMI advertises more than 30 locations nationwide and a menu of more than 200 items. The Cary format combines seafood, sushi and sashimi, hot pot, ramen, grilled dishes and desserts, giving one dining room the breadth of several different restaurant categories.
UMI Brings Its 200-Plus-Item Buffet Format to the Triangle
The new restaurant occupies a former Red Lobster at Cross Roads Plaza, one of the locations that closed during that chain’s 2024 restructuring. The reuse is particularly well suited to UMI. Large legacy seafood restaurants already offer substantial kitchens, broad dining rooms and the utility infrastructure needed to support high-volume food production.
UMI simply asks the building to do more at once. Instead of supporting one menu and one main kitchen flow, the concept spreads demand across sushi production, hot food, seafood displays, hot pot and other stations. The result is less a single buffet line than an edible ecosystem organized inside a former casual-dining box.
A Former Red Lobster Gives the Concept the Space It Needs
Cary joins an existing UMI in Winston-Salem and gives the brand a foothold in one of North Carolina’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas. The opening also arrives as UMI pushes beyond its earlier East Coast concentration into a genuinely national footprint.
The location is now open, so the development question has become an operating one: whether a 200-plus-item model can remain as broad in daily service as it looks on paper. For Triangle buffet diners, there is now plenty of material available for that investigation.
