I don’t do AYCE. The problem is that I want to win this game, and I over eat. Which is not good.
However, I remember an AYCE crab in Baltimore. They put down this paper table cloth on the table and brought out AYCE crab. Wow! Overdosing on crab is the best! Plus they had Sam Adams on tap. It was devine!
Yeah, that’s what I mean. A restaurant that lets you pay a flat fee or buy a la carte (and then you wish you did the former when you want more) is a good thing. A usually Chinese restaurant with sushi that you grab yourself behind a sneeze guard is not so good.
My “other” choice: Sunday brunch at The Ahwahnee. If you time it right, you can get both trout and prime rib.
Sadly, Mike’s Place, the BJ bar owned and operated by Mike, a fellow American, in the Patpong red-light area awhile back stopped his popular all-you-can-drink-plus-one-gratis-BJ (really!) nights. But those are well remembered by many of the residents here.
So I picked Mexican instead.
I must confess that I never had teppanyaki at an real Japanese place. Here it is an assortment of European and Far Eastern vegetables, lots of seafood (green shell mussels, salmon, cod, tilapia, prawns, surimi, baby sepia, pieces of squid, sometimes shark and other exotic kinds of fish) and a variety of meat (beef, pork, chicken, lamb, sometimes venison and rabbit.) I guess it is not very authentic.
Mixed cuisisne is rather the norm here in the German-Dutch border area. The Netherlands have lots of combined Chinese-Indonesian restaurants, after all.
It’s not a buffet, but my #1 all-you-can-eat place is Brazilian: Fogo de Chao.
For a buffet, Indian.
That sounds AWESOME!
Another vote for Indian here. Also, we’ve got a little mini-chain in these parts called “Der Dutchman.” It’s… I dunno. Pseudo-Amish, I guess. But the buffet is fabulous if you want good, stick-to-yer-ribs American country food. Mashed potatoes, fried chicken, turkey, beef, noodles, your usual gravies, stuffing, potato/bean/pasta salads, pickled beets, hard-boiled eggs sitting in pickled-beet-juice… all that good stuff. The old folks seem to love it–they literally truck 'em in. (Well, van 'em in.) The gift shop is a bit grating–heavy on Christian glurge, as you’d expect. But the food makes it worth it.
I’m not a fan of buffets, but Indian ones can be pretty good.
I’m not really apt to frequent any particular type of buffet, but I did eat at an Indian restaurant that had a buffet at lunch time only and served entrees at dinner. It was very good. So I guess, Indian.
Indian without a doubt. The standard meal we get is the thali, available in vegetarian or non-vegetarian. It is virtually your own private buffet on a tray.
Indian, no question – but only if it was busy enough that the cooks were always bringing out fresh food. Some of the dishes can sit for quite a while, but not the pooris, samosas, and other things that shouldn’t be soggy.
I prefer all you can eat Vegas Buffets. Mainly prime rib.
A British friend of mine took his Thai girlfriend to Vegas, and from what I can tell, the Vegas Hilton buffet was practically the high point of her life. He reportedly can’t take her to buffets in Bangkok now without her turning up her nose at it and declaring, “They call this a buffet? This is not a buffet. The Vegas Hilton, that’s a buffet.” They’re doing a tour of the US West, Southwest and northern Great Plains in October and November, and my friend has made sure to book them into the Vegas Hilton again, just because she loves the buffet so much.
Wow- that place is still there?!? I used to eat there weekly twenty years ago! Glad to hear quality stays.
When I lived in Vegas, the casino buffets were not there to make money, they were there to keep the gamblers in that particular casino, so the quality of food was much better. And the fancier the casino, the fancier the buffet. Even the rather cheap casinos usually had a pretty decent buffet. Casino restaurants that weren’t buffets usually had some sort of special going on, like shrimp cocktail or steak for a very low price. Again, the objective wasn’t to make a profit on the food, but to keep that gambler in the casino. Once a gambler went outside of a casino, chances were that he wouldn’t return to that particular casino again that day. He’d either go to another casino or do something other than gamble.
My parents came out to visit us a few times, and they could not believe the buffets in Vegas. My father thought that he’d died and gone to Heaven, except for the climate.
Man, I miss Circus Circus. They had the most amazing midway on the second floor, and circus acts every half hour.
He should really book them at a decent buffet instead of the Hilton, which, BTW, doesn’t exist anymore. It’s now the LVH hotel, and it sux. If that buffet sent her soaring, Bacchanal at Caesar’s or Wicked Spoon at Aria will kill her. My personal favorites are still the Buffet at Wynn and Studio B Buffet at M Resort.
There was a great Pho place by me long ago that had a lunch bowl for $3.50 or all the Pho you can eat for $5.
Turns out I can eat a hell of a lot of Pho when it is good.
I am imagining a Thai girl saying those lines in Jackie Mason’s voice and laughing my ass off.
AYCE buffets? I pretty much only see Chinese ones, and have yet to see one with any real quality to it.
Then there are the American ones, which are similar, but with various American foods. Meh.
Ohh, then there’s the Paul Bunyan restaurants. Do they still have those? Not really a buffet, but AYCE breakfast. Ron Swanson would never leave.
So far, my favorite is this Middle Eastern place that did a small AYCE deal on Th-Fri. They’ve since closed, but they used to have like 3 delightfully flavorful main dishes plus some rice dishes and salad and bread. Very tasty.
We have reservations for tomorrow for an AYCE Brazilian steak joint. I expect this will become my new favorite.