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| - I have to recalibrate. I had thought any Chinese buffet is good anytime, because you can go around and pick away at stuff and get a wide range of interesting flavors and a bounty of varied nutrition, just by being selective.
This was before I went to this Chinese buffet at 4pm on a Tuesday. That there were only a couple cars in the parking lot should have screamed 'Danger Will Robinson' but I had a $1 Yelp coupon.
4pm is "dinner", so it costs more than "lunch" but at 4pm what they do is scrape together what was left over from lunch in the trays into piles. Isolated piles of things left over from lunch, and the heating pans can't keep things warm enough.
Still, the discerning pickmeister who is only interested in a few bites of wide-ranging and tasty nutrition has a chance, with the immense range of offerings at a place like this. The green beans with onion were solid; the hot&sour and egg drop soups were kept hot; the two sashimi offerings were very thin but very nice.
Everything else was questionable, to dubious, to atrocious. A huge pile of crawfish looking red and glistening - - the worst crawfish I've ever had - - the meagre tails were dry, off-tasting and tough; most of the entrees in the pans were not only way past their lunchtime prime, but were lukewarm and very, very tired after their long afternoon; they had a huge roast beef looking thing but the colors were downright scary - - it looked horror show, really - - so I didn't try it; a blast of kimchi hopefully to live things up was old and room-temperature and just plain off; the glop that they put in the hot stuffed mussels tasted especially gloppy, and the pork dish tasted like, I'm sorry, like something from the hog's netherest regions. Everything on the plate was extremely hit or miss - - the range running between somehow barely edible to badly, badly flawed.
Weird too, was being seated as the only person in one section directly across from the forlorn soup chef with nothing to do - - he was hunched in a chair directly across from me, and just stared at me as I was eating.
One bright moment was following a server just coming in from the kitchen and refreshing the fried fish tray - - so by avoiding the one piece of fish left over from earlier, and taking a piece straight from the kitchen, this fried fish was zesty, tasty, lovely texture - - a real joy. I tried following around the server when he came from the kitchen after that, but didn't have the same luck when he seemed to be basically just re-arranging the vegetable lo mein into a fresher-looking pile, and although the new tray of peanut butter chicken did look fresh and hot, we are still talking peanut butter chicken here.
So - - this is a general truth - - eat at places where the turnover is HIGH, and they do each aspect of the offerings decidedly WELL - - and never go to a buffet when the parking lot is empty.
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