Quality of food is still Meh... (Kawawa Japanese Restuarant/ All you can eat dinner Revisit)

It's the eve of the Lunar New Year and my family wanted to go for all you can eat. My mom suggested Kawawa Japanese Restaurant at Metrotown. I've blogged about them before in the past (about two years ago, the blog post is here ) and I thought why not give them a try again to see if anything improved.
   One thing is for certain, the service has improved. When I arrived, the servers were much better than they were the last time we were here. This time, they actually were very cheerful, and came to ask us how everything was tasting during our meal (which they didn't do before). Also on our way out instead of adding a mandatory tip to the top of our bill they just gave us the bill and let us decide how much we wanted to tip. Of course one would feel more inclined to tip if the service was good and a mandatory tip was added. The service was good/satisfactory overall.
   That said, the food quality is pretty poor (though, there were one or two items that I liked). The menu is the same from lunch, however the price for dinner is much higher (at $21.95 per person!). You would expect that for $21.95 you would get food that is decent, but to my surprise the food was unpleasant. Where do I begin?
  Starting with the tempura...  The prawn tempura tasted as if it's been out on the counter for a very long time, the panko on the outside has dried up and when you taste it, the panko is actually pretty hard to chew (because it's cold and thick). In addition, the donburis that came from the All You Can Eat menu is halarious. For a unagi don, they gave us a bowl of rice with a bite sized piece of unagi on it. I understand the logic from the business point of view that the customer should be filled up as much as possible in order to maximize profit, but it seemed too obvious at this point.
   In addition, the chicken teriyaki was not fresh as well. The chicken literally has a layer on it that's hard and dried up. It seemed like the chicken has also been out on the counter for a long time and dried up, put into the fridge and reheated. You can taste it from the chicken as the flavour is gone, and you can see it from the appearance as well that the chicken wasn't freshly made.
   That said, there were some good parts about Kawawa that I did like. To be fair, I liked the house roll, unagi sushi. The unagi sushi was done pretty right in the sense that the portion of the unagi was big/ just rice compared to the rice below it. Also, the taste of the unagi didn't taste like the other stuff where it tasted like it has been previously frozen/ reheated. Also, the house roll was pretty special as it had a mixture of two different types of sashimi and some of the imitation crab.
  Overall, I probably might not come back here for a while because the amount that you have to pay to eat here compared to the value you get out of it seems to not be aligned. That said, there are some things that is definately worth a try like the house rolls and unagi sushi.