Buffet City

Buffets are a tricky thing. What things will move and which can sit there for a while and still be edible. Baby octopus can last a lot longer than squid just for example. I enjoy both. I like the crisp new décor. I haven’t seen the buffet in full force though I see the flaws in the lay out. The young woman who was monitoring the steam tables did something I had never seen in a buffet before. She did not scrape that last spoonful of old food on top of the new food she threw it away! That one small thing will keep me coming back.

The only reason we went here is because I thought it was a new business. But it’s not. Just a name change and some botched plastic surgery.
This place used to be called King Buffet. A no-​frills Chinese buffet that was a step or 14 below good. But it had a large amount of options and while the food was not as tasty as anyone would hope, it was plentiful.
But like governments everywhere, the owner, noticing that it didn’t quite work right as it was, decided to spend tons of money with a facelift for the business and make it work even worse than when before he started.
Gone are the 6 spaced buffet stations where you could graze through the isles like the proper cows buffet-​addicts are. Gone is about half the selection of fairly bad foods. Gone is about 10 tables worth of space that was taken over by making the whole thing into an odd speed-​bump of a buffet line.
Now the normally peaceful cows are angered and practically stampeding out of confusion and hunger. It’s so hard to get to anything you want due to the cattle milling about from both directions, all trying to get to the one or two items decent enough to gorge on so as to feel like your 13 bucks per bovine price-​tag was worth it.
There is a Mongolian grill now, but the way the entire mess is set up, it’s hard to get to him. He pretty much just stood in the window looking lonely.
The food quality has actually gone down. Which, I admit, I didn’t think was possible. The girly actually had to spit out some food into her napkin… And before the waiter took away the tray, she kept giving it dirty looks like she expected it to rise up and smite her.
When I asked the waiter about the place and mentioned how user-​unfriendly the new configuration was he actually said he agreed. He said it was done to simplify the process but it just made it much worse.
When more people figure out that it’s just the same King Buffet but with less choices and more chances of food poisoning, I think people will start staying away in droves…
Unless they are the same people who ate at King Buffet because it’s the perfect Chinese restaurant for people who don’t know anything about Chinese cuisine.
So this is my 200^th review and I somehow feel a bit cheated by wasting it on this mess of a place.