Cafe 100

Umm well not good. But inexpensive. And interesting combos for a crap buffet. It’s not healthy. It is not at all appetizing looking. But the food didn’t taste completely horrid, which I think is great. So, its hard for me to like buffets. I feel as though they harbor germs and they are gross and the food isn’t turned over in time and gets for real kine nasty… quick! So I will admit that there is a bias… and it is vehemently against buffets (if that wasn’t already apparent, tee hee).
Tip: Go early. Food gets worse as it sits — obviously.
I will say that it is damn cheap for a buffet. Damn cheap.
But to be honest, I think I would rather pay more for my food than pay less for unhealthy food and eat from here…
jus sayin…

Fresh salad everyday with make your own combination. One thing I like about Café 100 is that you got plenty of choices from Chinese, Italian, good old America and sandwiches if that’s what you crave for lunch. They make really good breakfast sandwiches. I like their English muffins with bacon and eggs and a side of fresh fruits. Mostly everything except the sandwich and deli bar is per pound, so you need to be precise with the quantity when you start piling up all the goodies on your plate. I work nearby and it’s convenient for me to dine here especially during rainy days and cold winter months. Cashiers and staff are friendly and location is clean and mostly tidy compared to many other lunch café’s within walking distance to the Harbor.

I go to this place often since I work nearby. I would say their breakfast bar is much better and cheaper than their lunch bar. I love their premade breakfast sandwiches and different choices of eggs.
Their lunch buffet is mostly filler food but they do have a large selection of fresh fruits/​veggies/​salads.

I get lunch from Café 100 at least once a week. It has a huge variety of items in cold and hot buffet bars. There is also a grill, which I only use once in a blue moon, so I can’t really comment on it, other than to say that I’ve been happy the few times I’ve gotten a sandwich there.
Instead, I typically hit the cold bar, because this is one of the few places around where I can have a healthy lunch of spinach and other raw vegetables. If Café 100 didn’t exist, I’d be hitting the other usual lunch suspects, filling up on greasy, goopy, processed crap.
The ingredients at the cold buffet are always very fresh. The salad items never look dried out or wilted. Café 100 seems to grasp the concept that you can’t put out excessive quantities of product that is prone to drying out, like carrots and mushrooms, and expect them to look decent for more than a day or so. As opposed to, say, my local Giant, where they cram a deep bin full of mushrooms on Sunday just to see how long it can make it through the week. Instead, Café 100 has shallow bins with only enough product to make it through the day. What a concept. The only downside is that, if you hit the salad bar late post lunch rush, the quantity of some product can get a bit low, especially if there is a convention in town, when they tend to get slammed. But this is the exception, rather than the rule.
In addition to the usual salad fare, the cold bar has various varieties of pastas, fruit, jello, and sushi rolls (California rolls).
I only purchase from the hot bar about once every few weeks. Its items are a bit more variable than the cold bar, but there are typically some American Chinese cuisine items, such as orange chicken and egg rolls, and other typical hot food lunch fare, such as chicken and pork.
Also, the place is immaculate. There is always someone wiping down and picking up the stray pieces of this and that, which are bound to accumulate at any type of buffet. The staff is very responsive. For example, at salad bars, the serving spoons for the stuff that sits in liquid (olives, beans, etc.) are supposed to be slotted. One time they had the non-​slotted version in the olives. I casually mentioned it at the checkout and it was fixed when I returned the following day. Another concern about the lid falling off the dressing was addressed immediately.
The only thing I can ding them on is pricing: $ 6.59/lb for the cold bar is pushing it. For the hot bar, where you are getting meat, OK, but…$ 6.59/lb for spinach, radishes, and croutons? It was a bit unnerving when I first started coming here to have a $ 10+ bill for salad and some sushi roll slices. I understand they’re in a high rent building near the Inner Harbor, but a dual pricing structure for the hot and cold bars, with $ 4.99−5.99/lb for the cold, might be more palatable.
Also, I’ve never seen them tare my purchases (i.e., subtract the weight of the containers from the weight of the product), so the guy who uses larger and/​or multiple containers is getting shafted to the tune of, I don’t know, a couple cents. But it’s about the concept, not about the money.
Finally, the scale is not integrated with the cash register, so the cashier uses a paper lookup table taped to the register to figure the price of items sold by weight. Now, these digital scales are accurate to, like, 0.01 of a pound, but this lookup table has about 20 entries on it, not 2000. You want to take a bet that they round down and not up? I won’t.
Obviously, though, I’m racking my brain here to come up with what amounts to nothing more than petty nit picks. This is America, and given that I’m too lazy to slap two pieces of bread together to take a lunch to work, my options are to either go hungry or pay Café 100 and suck it up. Plus, I suppose I really don’t have a problem paying perhaps a little more at a well-​run, locally-​owned small business that takes care of its customers.
There are plenty of seats — I’ve never seen them all filled — and there is a direct entrance to Pratt Street, in addition to the main entrance on the second floor of the Bank of America Center, which is directly across Pratt Street from the Convention Center and is on the skywalk.