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| - It's been years since I've gone to a Chinese buffet, to the point that the places I remember don't operate anymore. I really didn't have any expectations for the food, the atmosphere, or the price. My party of 20 successfully made a reservation for Sunday lunch and on the day of the tables were set and ready for us. I was pleased to find Dragon Legend well decorated and very clean on first impression. The interior of the restaurant actually quite a lot of seating available for large and small groups as well as three VIP rooms to the side available for larger groups might want some privacy. The main dining area has two large projectors showing classical Chinese cuisine videos. The actual area with the food is quite small but that is quite nice because you get to see at a glance all your options available, there are a number of different foods that you could go to such as the Peking duck station the noodle bar, the sashimi station, and the roast beef station. Depending on the day of the week and whether you go for lunch or dinner, availability of items may change. Sunday lunch has a decent variety of options - nothing too heavy and enough variety for us to feel like it was worth $22 per person that we paid.
The stations that I mentioned are manned by someone at all times, meaning it is not all self serve. The advantage of this is that people are limited to how much they can take and the food is kept in a sanitary and organized state. For example, only five pieces of sashimi are given each time on a plate so you'll have to frequent the station if you want more - there is no limit to how many times you go to the station. Seems a bit inconvenient, but definitely encourages trying out more variety and not wasting food.
Things to definitely try are their Peking roast duck and the noodle bar. The roast duck is generously sliced and the tortilla-like wraps are thin. In addition to the regular cucumber and spring onion toppings they also have crunchy taro bits - kind of like Hickory Sticks - which add texture and flavour. The noodle bar has a lot of variety and may seem confusing, but the noodles are green and purple due to added vegetables in the noodle, and you can choose which soup base as well as which meat to put in. Soup bases include chicken broth, fish soup, and some other bone-based soup. Meats included charsiu, pork dumpling, chicken I believe -there's signs with English and Chinese to choose from. The portion is just the right amount to give the noodles a try, but not fill you up so you cannot enjoy the rest of the buffet.
If you're looking for something traditional and not too filling, grab a bowl of longevity soup. With all the fixings of Chinese soup, the flavour is good and yet the soup is translucent and not oily. The soup will be like another cup or two of tea so it won't eat up your appetite.
The station to skip for me would be the ice cream, a bit disappointing. I was excited to find they have black sesame and green tea ice cream, as well as chocolate strawberry and sugar-free cappuccino. They had cones or bowls, and sundae toppings available. You can even DIY and get fruit from the salad bar, the beauty of a self-serve buffet. Unfortunately the ice cream was somewhere between hard and soft ice cream - a bit odd, and the texture suggested a very low-quality, air-filled ice cream. The flavours were more promising by name than actual taste so a few spoons in I was ready to give up. There are other dessert options as they have a full table devoted to cakes and pastries, but don't have too high of expectations there either. The cakes were average and much of the table suffers from sitting out for a bit too long, especially if you're a patron looking to maximize your stay until last call.
Overall, the lunch meal was acceptable in price for the quality of the meal - definitely a large variety of options and overall everything was acceptable in taste and freshness. The price is much too high for dinner, no matter what special items they offer (there would probably be lineups anyway). It was good to see that there were still specialty stations open for lunchtime, and I would probably come back for a similar large gathering since there's something for everyone and saves me brainstorming restaurant options. Further bonus was there was no cake-cutting/plating fee - we brought a small cake for the birthday boy and it was taken away for fridge storage with no trouble at all.
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