Gekko

You either hate it or love it! That seems to be the general opinion. Personally I love it. Wife doesn’t feel the same.
Gekko’s is extremely busy place and has a massive turnover of working lunchtime eaters and casual tourists.
There is wide coverage of different Asian menus available at a very reasonable price, and you can eat as much as you like. Drinks are inexpensive and fair quality.
Drawback is that the tables are crammed together making manouvreing around a bit risky, especially with a plate of noodles in your hand!
Not bad at all, really!

If you’ve got that ‘I’m so hungry, I could eat my own shoe’ feeling, then AND ONLY THEN, might Gekko be worth a go. Because, honestly? Your own shoe, with a bit of sweet and sour sauce, will probably be as good as the gunk dished up here. Sorry — I know that’s really harsh, but this experience is so joyless, you may just have to redefine what your definition of food, and eating out, is! There are so many buffet joints in town that offer cheap, half decent food that I just can’t understand why you’d settle for this! And do be sure to check your bill — they sometimes put a service charge on — AT A SELF SERVICE RESTAURANT! Now that’s just weird… and downright cheeky!

The toss up here is whether you want to go for top quality cuisine or whether you want to stuff yourself. If you decide on the latter then a good place to go would be Gekko, especially because it’s designed for the indecisive folk like me. Serving Thai, Malaysian, Chinese, Texmex, sushi, pizza, pasta and soups, there’s something for everyone in this all-​you-​can-​eat diner. During the day its just £6.99 a head and in the evening the menu is extended to £12.99 with additions of noodles, stir-​fry, tandoor and chargrill Indian.
Considering this place is a buffet venue, I think the décor is quite tasteful with stripped flooring and high-​backed chairs, making it feel much more like a restaurant than most. The food, too, considering there is an abundance of different cuisines, also isn’t that bad. Dishes like Mee Goring and chicken fajitas aren’t often found on the same menu in buffet halls. Desserts aren’t just a yoghurt or a piece of fruit either. There’s cakes, muffins, pastries and even a creperie. For the genre it’s in, it isn’t bad at all. Perhaps I haven’t been to enough to judge.

Another of Brighton’s endless buffet nightmares, Gekko has recently replaced WokMania as West Street’s Asian buffet of choice, and not much seems to have changed indoors. It may even just be a name-​change: I can’t see any difference, not that this is all a bad thing. This is still the Asian greasy spoon, the Far East equivalent to a fry-​up, and every now and again this is exactly what you need. However, as buffet places in town go, Gekko isn’t quite as nice as some of the others… nice being a pejorative term here.
The food is, as expected, a grease factory. Unlike some of the other buffet places, it actually looks a bit rank: maybe the slightly yellow lighting was a bad idea. As well, the choice here is a little limited: the buffet being big, but not as packed with different flavours as some of the other places around town. The décor is also rubbish: the worst kind of Asian modernity, so often done in places like this, and always tacky and awful. It almost goes with the territory, but the crowd here is also particularly rubbish: the West Street clientele do not look their best when choking down a plate of noodles. No, there are better buffets, not much but still slightly… go there instead.