I didn’t notice your location until just now. I just popped in here to mention the new Golden Corral on Three Notch Rd. Didn’t realize that there were many Dopers in this neck of the woods. My wife and I are going to wait at least a month before going there, since they will be packed overflowing at least that long…
There are multiple Indian lunch buffets around here, and most of them are of moderate to good quality. There’s a Sweet Tomatoes that is a salad bar/soup bar/pizza buffet/pasta bar/dessert bar place. I know that there are some Asian buffets, but most of them are kinda grody, although a friend of mine recently recommended an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet that he claims was good. I guess I don’t see the buffet concept fading out so much as changing cuisine.
Uh huh.
There is one Chinese buffet close to my home. The price is very cheap. It is approx $6 for the lunch buffet and $7 for the dinner buffet. It’s exactly the same food. But if you enter the restaurant after 5pm, you pay the extra dollar.
The food is terrible. It’s all standard fare. Chicken Wings, terrible noodles, sweet & sour chicken balls, lots of rice, etc.
There are usually only 2 or 3 tables with customers out of the 30 tables in the place.
I used to only go there about once a year after I forgot how unsatisfying the food was. I guess it took me that long to forget. But the last time I went was about 5 years ago.
The only explanation as to why they are still in business is that maybe the restaurant is a front for some kind of illegal activity that goes on the second floor or in the basement?
Nothing else makes sense to me.
They do advertise home delivery. But whenever I’ve been there in the evenings, there is no activity that suggests any home delivery taking place. It’s a real mystery to me.
I’m picturing a family of near-housebound obese people, irate because the restaurant wouldn’t deliver them seconds when they called back 1/2 hour later. “I thought you were a Chinese buffet and delivery!” :mad:
In my experience there are usually three kinds of buffet food types: Asian, pizza, American.
Asian seems as easy to find as it always was. Pizza is a little harder but still easy to find. However American buffets are disappearing. Companies like Ryans or ponderosa have largely disappeared, leaving golden corral as the only option. Finding an American buffet is getting harder.
Cheap buffets are still relatively easy to find at $5-8 a person. There is a great meat buffet for 25 in town but I’ve only been once. But cheap American buffets are hard. Golden corral is about 13, so twice the cost of an Asian or pizza buffet.
I haven’t seen an Indian buffet in a while. Never seen a Mexican one. Maybe one or two seafood. Maybe Asian food and pizza are just the cheapest, easiest to prep buffet foods.
On the subject of pizza buffets, it is likely a product of moving around but my perception is that those are much more common than when I was a kid. I’d only every seen one pizza buffet in my life until I moved out of the Pacific Northwest.
But then it was quite a shock when I discovered that some parts of the country have Kentucky Fried Chickens with buffets. The joys of travel, discovering the regional variations on unhealthy eating.
Do you live some place with a reasonable Indian community? Some of the Indian restaurants are only buffet on weekends or Sundays or something like that, but there are a reasonable number of restaurants with a permanent buffet option.
Until this thread, I didn’t know pizza buffets were a thing. I guess I’ve seen it once, at a place called Home Run Inn which has a buffet option for lunch until 2 p.m. But that’s the only one I could think of, and I wouldn’t even had known it had a buffet if I hadn’t gone there for lunch. (Although I got a fresh pizza instead.)
We still have a few buffet restaurants in my town. The most popular would be The Mandarin.
My husband and I don’t bother with buffets because I don’t eat much plus being vegetarian limits our options so they’re actually a waste of money for us. But when we still ate meat? Cha-ching!
Does Souplantationcount? They have a huge salad bar, soup, pasta and bakery served buffet style. As far as I can tell they are still doing well in most western states.
They’re called ‘Sweet Tomatoes’ in other parts of the country, I think. At least in Texas they are.
It’s Sweet Tomatoes here in Utah as well. And as buffets go, they have it right:
- a high traffic salad bar (since that’s their specialty) that’s constantly turning over fresh ingredients
- freshly baked breads
- a station for soups, which typically do pretty well being held for service on steam tables
What about those Brazilian steak houses? Lots of those around, and has the ethos of the all-you-can-eat buffet, complete with fully stocked salad bar (some of the ones here even has sushi and tortellini in the salad bar section.)
Yeah, they’re called “Sweet Tomatoes” out here in the Chicago area. I don’t think there’s any in the city, but they’ve been popping up over the last decade or so in the suburbs. Looks like there’s six of them within 35 miles of Chicago’s center. Never been to one, but heard good things.
The buffet is certainly still alive and well in Las Vegas, where nearly every resort has one that stays packed all the time. On my last trip there I noticed that Caesar’s owned casinos sold a 24 hour buffet pass, talk about gluttony.
I don’t think there is an Indian community. There probably are Indian buffets in my town, but I haven’t looked. I just know pizza and asian buffets are everywhere, if I wanted Indian I’d have to search and do some driving.
Pizza buffets have a few national chains. Cicis has 500+ stores, plus pizza hut usually has a buffet option. So there should be options everywhere. Where I live there are a lot of local options too, but those 2 stores should be nationwide.
I’ve never heard of Cici’s (apparently, there are a couple in the suburbs of Chicago–looks like Niles and Orland Park have the closest locations, around 15-20 miles from the city center), but I do know Pizza Hut, of course. Don’t remember them being a buffet, though. That said, I don’t remember ever eating at a Pizza Hut–we’d pretty much always get pizzas to go from there. I do have some vague recollection of a salad bar, though.
So, forgive the dumb question, is a pizza buffet just generally all sorts of pizza out and available as all-you-can-eat, or is it a mix of American-Italian dishes? Like could you get beef or sausage or pasta or that sort of stuff?
I forgot there is also a steak buffet in town. The steaks are 5oz and USDA choice. They also have burgers (on one day) and chicken. The usual potatoes, salad, dessert. Not too bad actually.
Brian
The Sunday Bruch Buffet at the Biltmore in Santa Barbara is $72 but it’s amazingly good food, most of it made to order and all if it is high quality. Plus it’s at one of the most beautiful locations in the world.
It’s not worth it for me because I don’t eat enough at a sitting. I ate there a couple of times a long while back when it was “only” $45.
That looks awesome.
I’m quite sure I could get my $72 back at the caviar station alone, throw in a dozen or two oysters and a 1/2 rack of lamb and they’ll never want to see me again.