You’d think this would be a simple question for Google or Yelp, but for some reason Yelp seems to suck at this and Google returns a huge list with few ratings or descriptions.
So I turn to the Dope; I know we have a few… Friscans? SFers? Not sure what you call yourselves 
What are some good buffets here under $30 per person ish?
Our #1 choice would be all-you-can-eat sushi.
#2 would be Indian.
But any sort of buffet would be fine, really. We’re just hungry
I am not properly an SF Doper, across the Bay in Oakland. I know of places on this side of the bay, but I don’t know of any buffets in the City.
Most of the Bay Area residents I know just tend to call us lucky!
Lost contact with the sdmb for the edit window…
Sounds like you saw yelp, but I don’t know these places, so I can’t recommend.
Berkeley and Oakland have lots of Indian and Sushi all you can eat- Akasaka on Telegraph for Sushi is my favorite. $7.00 pitchers!
Do they have a buffet? I can’t find it on their website.
And the $7 pitchers… always, or only during happy hour? The menu just says 4.95 for a large. $7 pitchers alone might be worth the drive!
Gaylord is an Indian restaurant in the Embacardero Center downtown. They have a nice lunch buffet, $13.95 all you can eat.
There is an all you can eat Indian buffet just down the street from City Lights bookstore (right next to San Francisco Brewing Company) that is pretty good, but I dont think they serve beer…
(I may be mixing it up with another Indian place in that lower North Beach neighborhood—I remember the food was really good, but I was kinda bummed that I couldnt get a cold Kingfisher to wash down the spicy vindaloo. As just about everywhere sells beer in California, it stood out in my memory as quite unusual, but the food was very tasty)
There are few real buffets in SF proper, due to the Homeless. Really.:eek: Most buffets are done by the pound, and it gets quite pricey.
Really? How do you know it’s due to the homeless?
That’s what a couple of restaurant owners told me- that the homeless will come in and sit down and stay all day, eating. Lots of things in SF are due to the high homeless pop- weird and hard to sit on bus seats, the fact that a number of “drop the cash in” turnstiles can’t be used unless there is a attendant watching them (which makes them fairly pointless) and so forth.
It’s backed by the fact that *every other *downtown around here has several all you can eat buffets. In fact the “Oriental Seafood Buffet” places are endemic.
That’s scary. It’s hard to imagine a few customers eating, say, 2x-3x the normal amount of food spread over a day affecting their profit THAT much. I mean these places churn out food by the ton, don’t they?
But maybe that’s why I’m not a restaurant owner.
It isn’t so much the food that they eat, but that they are taking up a table and looking undesirable, which turns away other customers.
:smack:
Duh. I’m too used to them.
Exactly.
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
Naan 'N’Curry does a lunch and dinner buffet
They’ve got a handful of locations around the city. It’s not great food, but IIRC, their Tenderloin/Union Square location on O’Farrell is open 24 hours.
On the sushi front, it looks like Natori on Balboa is no longer. Too bad…I’ve eaten several pounds of nigiri over the years there.
There’s also Tommy’s Joint, but the last couple of times I was there the food was very salty. Incredible selection of beers though! Eclectic ambiance.
Tommy’s Joynt is a hofbrau (cafeteria style food service, not a buffet (at least not in the sense of take as much as you want of whatever you want; and definitely not all you can eat for a flat price).
If all-you-can-eat is what’s wanted and you like meat I’m told that Espetus Churrascaria is very good. Expensive as that style of restaurant tends to be.
As mentioned, Gaylord’s Indian lunch buffet is good. All you can eat sushi is available in a few places but generally I avoid putting “all-you-can-eat” and “sushi” in the same sentence so couldn’t recommend anyplace. If you mean simply “take what you want but pay for it” then there’re decent sushi boat or conveyer belt places, head to Japantown.
Wait…I live one block from Akasaka, but I’ve never been tempted to go in. Something about all you can eat sushi screams ‘Low Quality! Now with 50% less asbestos!’ to me. Tell me more about this place!