Text 12227, 105 rader
Skriven 2007-02-23 07:49:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: dinner with eden 108
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Carol's friend Eden was home from some major project and needed
comfort, so off we went to the local Chinese buffet, I think it's
called Grand Fortune, if not, something very close. It was crowded
mostly with roundeyes (of all sizes and shapes, from svelte to
pyramidal) but a few Asians here and there - Chinese New Year, you
know. Usually, there are quite a few things to eat - salt-pepper
shrimp and squid, raw clams, greenlips two ways ... this time the
selection was lackluster; Carol thought that as it was crab leg
night, people just went for that, so they don't really bother much
with the other things. Plausible from the evidence.

The sushi were okay: red clam, with big pieces of clam, slightly
tough, but I don't mind that; squid, rather slimy, but I don't
mind that; and very fatty salmon, I don't mind that, either - but
didn't appreciate its not being very fresh. There was also some
weird fish - dark red-orange but translucent, with red thready
things that I looked carefully to make sure that they weren't
some kind of worm. Eden found it uneatably fishy; I tasted it
and found it oily but not unappealing. Sort of like a red version
of super white tuna. There were also several offerings that I
didn't bother to try: a California-like roll, tuna (altogether
too red-looking), and a couple others.

I was disappointed by a very limited seafood selection that mostly
looked kind of yesterday:

salt-pepper shrimp, stewed in oil rather than fried, so that
the breading became quite nasty, but the shrimp were tender and
fairly delicious (as were the shells);

regular but very small fried shrimp, okay;

boiled tiny shrimp (didn't try - looked waterlogged);

rather sad shrivelled-looking green-lip mussels - I had two;
they tasted sad and shrivelled and were most likely spoiled;

baby octopus, also sad and shrivelled, but I had one to try,
and it was gritty, so no more;

no raw bar at all, alas;

and snow crab legs, big batches of which came out regularly,
with people clamoring for them. I tried one, and it was
salty, overcooked, and tasteless.

On the regular buffet one found the usual round of nasty
things, General This's That, Sugar Beef, and so on, though
interspersed with enough edible stuff so I got dinner.

Roast beef round was medium-rare, a rarity. It was in a
big pool of "au jus sauce" that came up to the edges of
the tray, so when you cut a slice using the not-too-sharp
knife on offer, waves of greasy juice came up over the
edge and on at least one occasion cascaded all over my
once-chic Italian shirt. The meat was fair to middling,
having been Adolphized, but I had two servings of it,
about 10 oz total, so that made up the bulk of my meal.

Beef with green peppers - tenderized undercooked mystery
cut left to finish under the hot lamp. Interestingly,
this buffet station was three dishes wide in places, and
this dish was in the middle, so most people didn't bother
reaching that far. So the beef and the peppers ended up
stewing for a very long time at a fairly low temperature.
Okay, but I wasn't inspired to take a second serving.

Chicken with broccoli - aside from the beef, I ate mostly
this, and as the chicken was white meat, I picked the
broccoli out special. Carol kept making condescending good
boy noises.

"Roast duck," really soy sauce duck, odds and ends mostly -
I got a leg that looked as though someone had trimmed off
the good parts already; it was lousy.

Pan-fried dumplings were not the usual shape, so people
ignored them. The skins were tender and thin; the filling
very porky and scalliony. Not bad at all, for frozen
premade; much better than, say, Trader Joe's.

There were no chicken wings, very strange. At this meal,
I would have killed for chicken wings.

Also available was the Mongoloid grill, where you pick
your own meat and vegetables and the bored-looking guy
behind the sneeze guards dumps it all into a giant wok
and cooks it for you. The meat was watery, previously
frozen (and in fact some of it still looked frozen); I
passed on the whole procedure.

I made myself an artistically-arranged plate of blue
Jell-O (grape, as it turned out) and almond float (grainy
and not almondy enough) and spoiled it with a dollop of
some of the worst tapioca pudding I've ever encountered,
with the flavor of elementary-school paste.

Carol had said that on weekends the buffet charged $15
to make up for all the wonderful extra things it offered.
The actual price was only $12.95, a relief as there
weren't any wonderful extra things,

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