Text 22313, 128 rader
Skriven 2012-03-12 10:17:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: a buffet report 364
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After our triumphant concert, a dozen of us went out to the
Mandarin in somethingborough, west I think, the only place
that could accommodate a party of our size on Sunday night
for reasonable cost. There used to be a favorite restaurant
just down the street, Chengdu, but for some reason it has
been undergoing renovations for at least nine months, and
we had called ahead to see if they were open, which they
were, but only the bar area, which was deemed unsuitable
for a festive occasion. Seems that after Chengdu started
remodeling, this place opened up and has stolen its thunder.
The eventual verdict was that the food is better at the
new place, the decor is better at the new place, the buzz
is more fun at the new place, and the help, it's a Chinese
buffet, what can you say about the help.

This report is an attempted exercise in mindful eating: the
thing about the AYCE buffet format is you tend to shovel food
down in quantity without paying it even the small attention it
deserves. The temptation is to go for the expensive stuff. For me
the draw is protein and fat in the form of the more dubious cuts
of meat that they use to minimize cost. It helps if the food is
fresh and tastes okay. In this case, I don't think I got my
money's worth but had a reasonable time and a reasonable meal.

My first plate:
4 chicken wing second joints, brined and rather too salty,
fried nicely to a medium crispness, flavored with five-spice
powder; these were from frozen but of pretty high quality,
and crunching the bones yielded a fresh-tasting marrow
(usually wings of this sort have a somewhat rancid marrow);

2 pretty good salt-pepper shrimp, 26-30s, breaded in American-
style (as opposed to cornstarch) batter and deep fried; these
had been brined as well but were not too salty; they had a bit
of a kick despite having no visible means of heat aside from
a few dried red pepper pods of the usual ornamental variety;

a chive-shrimp paste dumpling, from a dumpling factory, good-
tasting chives but the shrimp paste tasted like cornstarch
paste (I suspect surimi);

one baked scallop - a shell with unidentifiable very rubbery
and tough seafood, I thought maybe chopped surf clam, gratinated
with some kind of liquidy cheese sauce - not worth the pill;

a couple pieces of "boneless spare rib" of the normal standard -
I tried to choose the fatty pieces, but one of them had white
bits that turned out to be insufficiently marinated pork;

a taste of the brown pork out of a dish of pork with broccoli.
This was surprisingly good, leg meat cut thin from frozen,
doused with the usual sauce from a 55-gallon drum, but good
meat with a proper ratio of fat and lean, and not the bottom
of the barrel sauce.

Lin Long and his wife Jane were next to me and recommended
the basil chicken, so that started off my second plate; it was
extremely basiled, with handfuls of the stuff flavoring little
cubes of white meat chicken in a lightly thickened soy based
sauce. It was okay.

Next to that, a full serving of the pork with broccoli and a
few shreds of extremely bland pad thai - note to Chinese
restaurants - adding a bit of sugar to rice noodles does not
make them pad thai;

three, no, four boneless spare rib pieces, fatty ones this time;

a pair of shrimp dumplings that looked promising but on tasting
tasted like surimi and Chinese sweatshop factory;

a few pieces of lobster in ginger and scallion, the justification
the restaurant uses to charge $17.50 for the buffet: the way they
make it work is by putting out only a couple lobsters' worth at
a time, these poor creatures having been hacked up in the most
inconvenient way, so that you get all the fun of eating lobster
but only half the calories. The good news is that this ensures
that the stuff is fresh (and in fact was quite good though a bit
overcoated with cornstarch); the bad news is that if you don't
hang around the lobster bin for the next distribution, and if
you don't push forward piggishly, you get little bits of chopped
up body meat and perhaps a knuckle if you're lucky. On this
occasion I managed to find a couple tail slices that had been
neglected as under some detritus as well as the usual, so I
felt very rich indeed.

From the sushi table I found an okay-tasting spicy fake crab roll
with a thin piece of tuna over and a lot of salmon nigiri, of
which I got one piece, which was somewhat fishy and second-grade
fresh but not bad.

Final plate, a revisiting of favorites: two salt-pepper shrimp,
a little pork with broccoli; two boneless spare ribs; three
pieces of lobster, two body and one arm, that were sitting there
awaiting reinforcements, which came as soon as I went back to
the table (whereupon I informed our crew, who descended on the
bounty in the locustlike way that I disdain in others).

Things I didn't have.

Hot-sour, wonton, and/or miso soup is served to your table.
I seldom waste stomach space on sodium water.
Peking ravioli
egg rolls
lo mein
satay of mystery meat
"steak teriyaki"
tempura vegetables
mixed vegetable stir-fry in white sauce
salad
Vietnamese rolls
various rolled sushi
California roll
some kind of brown pudding
Jell-O
fruit
ginger ice cream
cookies

Fortune cookies were dark brown and tasted sort of like chocolate.

On the whole, a decent meal, which I would have been happy
to pay $10-12 for without lobster. Or maybe I should have ordered
from the regular (average-looking) menu and gotten more better food,
though less variety, for somewhat less money.
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