The concept of the Chinese buffet-referred to as the “Chinese smörgåsbord” in early newspaper reporting on the trend-spread between owners from that community, replicating and taking on local adaptations in a way that seems downright evolutionary. Chinese buffets are an even narrower subset: Most are staffed by Fujianese immigrants, who come from a region in southeastern China. There’s a reason why most restaurants are staffed and owned by people from the country or culture that the restaurant represents. Restaurants are contingent, almost fleeting things: contingent not only on economics and consumer preferences, but also on the culture in which particular food practices are rooted-and a whole lot of tacit knowledge to boot. They enter a period of progressive, reinforcing decline that eerily resembles the biological process of aging and dying.Ī restaurant, menu, or cuisine isn’t exactly a widget, a thing that can be manufactured at scale. It’s true, of course, that businesses can execute turnarounds and reinventions. The feelings evoked are similar, in a way, to those brought on by seeing a person age: the same sense of nostalgia, wistfulness, even mourning. It’s hard to see a place you once loved-with the same front counter, steam tables, sushi bar, and tables-in a state of decay and neglect, and to remember its former glory. The Chinese buffet, which first emerged in the 1950s before exploding in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is no longer a new or exciting concept, and those which have not shuttered in recent years are often operating below their prime. Growing up, the lunch crowd was always a cross-section of America: office workers, Chinese and Chinese-American families, whites, blacks, and Latinos: everybody.

I also love the democratic vision of the buffet. Much about them inspires loyalty: I love their variety, and the excitement of being freed from anybody else’s opinion about what your meal looks like, or how you’re going to eat it. There are a lot of meals that can be had for $20, and the buffet, once a deal that inspired childlike excitement, is now at the lower end of that list-hardly exciting at all.īlake Masters is dog paddling away from a personhood amendment, the term “pro-life” is in…Īs a fan of buffets both in theory and practice, I say all this with a heavy heart. Between the decline in quality and the increase in price, it feels like you’re paying double. It used to be $13 or $14 now it’s $18 or $19. The oysters are gone too, which-given the state of the rest of the food-is a blessing in disguise.Īnd the price.

The dishes are mostly the same, but the flavors are all a bit muted, mixed up, and heading in the direction of off. (Broiled eel? Forget about it.) You feel guilty making a plate at the hibachi bar, since it no longer has a dedicated grill cook.

There’s no salmon on the sushi tray, leaving just tilapia and alarmingly pink tuna. We might survey the essential features starting in the entryway: The front counter is a little messy. Being a stickler for detail might make more sense in a fine dining context than that of all-you-can-eat Americanized Chinese food, but the devil really is in the details. metro area I had stopped by more than a year after it reopened following a long COVID shutdown. This encounter took place during a visit to one of my erstwhile favorite all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets in the Washington, D.C. I should have turned around and walked the other way, but I piled my plate high instead. Not of a deceased relative, but the ghost of once-fresh lo mein and sesame chicken.

Asian buffet