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| - The $8.99 salad bar-with-appetizers lunch is a huge win if your real goal is to eat a solid, pretty cheap lunch and you want some vegetables to make you feel good about what you're planning to do with taco shells, potato skins, and, later, dessert. The staff will help you feel good, as they are the sweetest people ever, and they deliver generous drink refills along with baskets of cheese toast.
If you're looking for fancy pre-made salads, the selection is smaller and less creative than at Souper Salad or Sweet Tomatoes. If, like me, you're going with a few spinach or lettuce frills as a base for the good stuff, Sizzler has the edge of offering not just diced ham, not just pepperoni slices, but also diced bacon. There is also ambrosia salad, demonstrating a proper respect for the role of marshmallows in traditional salad-making (for real -- cookbooks of the 1950s love marshmallows and whipped cream in "salad").
The only soup (of the four) that I tried was the clam chowder: since it is the "signature" soup, it is available on a day other than Friday (say, Saturday!), which may make the case for this buffet right there. It's not going to send you into rhapsodies about the chowder you once ate in Boston or San Francisco, but it is recognizable and pleasant clam chowder that goes nicely with the cheese toast. Again, soup selection was less diverse than Sweet Tomatoes... but the trade-off for not getting Greek lemon soup or other more chi-chi delights is being able to have clam chowder on a non-Friday.
The appetizer bar, while small, blows past Sweet Tomatoes on the grounds of offering actual proteins (Sweet Tomatoes' spread looks splendidly chi-chi and healthful, then it dawns on you that it's a carb wallow) and past Souper Salad on grounds of offering... carnitas! Carnitas! I just met a scoop of carnitas! There are also flour tortillas deep-fried into cup shapes, and there is fresh guacamole that is definitely made with actual avocados. It is possible to construct a highly respectable Tex-Mex lunch.
There are also various forms of chicken parts (which I didn't try), potato skins (ditto), and pasta that can be draped with meatballs (which were pleasant, though not memorable). If you worked at it, you could probably manage a pasta in a salsa cream sauce, like at the chi-chi fusion restaurants... and on my next visit, I might.
The best part of Souper Salad, on a good day, is getting the gingerbread and slathering it with sundae toppings. Sizzler goes more for poundcake -- it also has mini desserts and soft serve -- and promises the exotic addition of pineapple topping. I need to go here on a day when I'm utterly starving, as there is much to explore, now that I have the lay of the land.
This is a four-star rating on the basis of being good at being a budget-ish buffet lunch, so if you're looking for organic greens and the finest ingredients, Sizzler's not a hidden Maryvale treasure. It's better-than-fast-food at a fast food price, plus everything's labeled with any common food allergy triggers (so you may not be able to eat everything, but at least you won't break out in horrible symptoms), and my delightful server brought me a to-go cup for the remainder of my iced tea (gratefully accepted, since I was taking the bus).
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