Back to Peking Buffet, Williamsburg, VA

A number of years back in 2007 the Peking Buffet was our first "Best Asian Buffet". They still have the certificate framed in their door's entrance way. It is also listed on their website. This was always a buffet that we looked forward to going to whenever we were in this area. Then about four or so years ago, they added some things and made some changes to what was served on the buffet. I am sure many will like what they added - a section of Thai food and also a Sushi Train. Many will also like the changes to some of the dishes on the buffet toward hot and spicy. We don't really like hot and spicy - and most of the Thai food that is on its own buffet section is also spicy - so the appeal for us to come here was reduced a bit. Where we would have come back more than once, it has become a maybe visit once. It is however the only Asian buffet of any significance remaining in this immediate area. Others that we have been to in the past and have written about are now gone.

So - w were there recently and we went back. My experience this time was more positive as I found some entrees on the Vegetarian section of the buffet that are favorites and while I am not a vegetarian, these dishes and a few others made for a very satisfactory meal.

One of the things that has remained here is an extensive selection of soups - and with this there is a noodle section at the grill counter where you select one of several different types of noodles and a soup will be created for you by the chef behind the counter consisting of ingredients of your choosing.  We both had Vietnamese pho noodles with cilantro in broth. It was very good - it always has been.

I have written about the Sushi Train before and you can look up any of my other articles in the past few years about this buffet. Let's just say that if you want to stand and watch unlabeled plates of sushi move past you on a track and "have to" take each single piece with its plate, and try to carry more than two or three back to your table - and you like spicy sushi - you will love this. I don't bother with it any more. It may work in Tokyo where you sit at a counter with this going by in front of you - it does not work in a buffet.

The two dishes that I found on the Vegetarian section were vegetable chow mein and vegetable moo shu.  I wish other Asian buffets would add these two simple dishes. I like chow mein. I like moo shu. I admit that to the chow mein I added chicken from the chicken and broccoli tray as I walked back to our table. I also went to the Mongolian grill - they still have the large round domed grill that was very popular at many Asian buffets a number of years ago - and have now been replaced by small hibachi grills.  At his grill, it is the usual choose your meats and vegetables - then pour over that sauces - and hand this to one of two chefs who move your selections around the circumference of the big grill with sticks until it is cooked. The sauces are spicy or sweet. I put none on mine and added soy sauce when I got back to the table and this made me happy.

While we were eating a family of four came in. The couple had a toddler age boy and girl. They decided that they were ordering from the menu - which you can do here if you don't want the buffet. They ordered sushi rolls for themselves and fried rice and lo mein for the kids. What came were two huge platters of fried rice and lo mein. Enough in each platter to feed four hungry adults. All of this was on the buffet (except perhaps the specific sushi rolls that they ordered). The kids each ate about five spoonfuls of the fried rice and noodles. The parents did not take any. All of this was still on the table when they left. It was not that they did not like it - they seemed very happy while they were eating, but it was way too much. They must have paid more for this than if they had ordered the buffet - for the size of these platters and what the sushi ordered this way costs, they had to have. They should have just ordered the buffet. Even the waitresses who cleared the table after they left were amazed at how much food was left untouched.

There is a lot to eat here if you like what you find and if you can eat what is here. Everything is tasty. The food is good. Service is good. The price is also very reasonable at $12.99 for dinner. I am hoping that when I have an opportunity to go back, they will have the chow mein and moo shu again - not spicy.

If you are in this area and want to have all you care to eat Asian, try it. I am certain that anyone who does not mind hot and spicy Asian foods will find much, much more than those of us who would like to eat it but just can't - but still we found enough to eat to end the meal full.

The Peking Restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia is located at 120 Waller Mill Road in the Big Kmart Shopping Center. (Kingsgate Green Shopping Center – Bypass Road (Rt.60)). The phone number is (757) 229 - 2288. There is a website and that is listed at the side of this page.

Good Taste Buffet, Commack, New York

It has been four years since I have written about the Good Taste Buffet, a Chinese buffet, in Commack, New York on Long Island. We have been back since but it seems that I have just not written about it. We no longer go there as often as we once had. For one reason, it is a distance - though not very far, and another reason is that there is a better priced Chinese buffet very close by.

On my birthday this year I was planning on going to Connecticut to Foxwoods for dinner. Yes, that is a very far and long distance but we make a day of it and stop at other favorite places along the way. The weather on my birthday was not great and I did not want to make the drive to Connecticut in that weather - and as it would be better the next day - we put the trip off a day. So that left me with deciding where I wanted to have dinner on my birthday. Had we not been planning to go to Foxwoods the next day, there are several "expensive" buffets locally that would have made for a "special occasion" birthday dinner, but since we would be making that trip the next day, I wanted to go locally to a more reasonably priced buffet. My first thought was Good Taste Buffet and the reason that is for me is the one item served there on the dinner buffet that is unlike any other local buffet - real Chinese broiled spare ribs that are not soaked in sweet red sugar sauce. I have written about these ribs before and these are real Chinese restaurant spare ribs. These are the ribs that I grew up with at Chinese restaurants. So despite the drive through heavy rain, we were going to Good Taste Buffet.

Overall, nothing has really changed about Good Taste Buffet. What I wrote about the food selections here are pretty much the same today. Even the price has remained the same at $14.99 for dinner. The thing that I come here for - as I just said - is the ribs and I make the bulk of my meal here those spare ribs. They are meaty - most are moist - and they are not covered in any sauce. If you want duck sauce or hot mustard that is available with the condiments. The meat for the most all peels off the bone as you bite into it and pull. These are not barbecue ribs - they are Chinese spare ribs - so the meat does not fall off the bones. On some nights, the rib tray empties and it is a wait for more to come out. On this night the rib tray was quickly refilled as soon as it got down near the bottom. These are popular here - for good reason - and it is best to not wait if you plan on more ribs, but go up and take what you want when they come out. This way you have the pick of the meatiest ribs. (This is not telling your to fill your plate with more than you will eat - just take what you will eat.- and as an aside there are now signs around the buffet that you will be charged extra if you leave over food on your plate. A common sign at some buffets.)

There is a lot more here than ribs and the food here is very good. The egg rolls are filled with pork and vegetables and are another "real Chinese restaurant" taste. Also like this is the Shrimp with Lobster Sauce with lobster sauce traditionally seasoned, thick, and full of egg white. All that is missing from what is traditional Chinese restaurant Shrimp with Lobster sauce is the ground pork. There is no pork or meat in this dish here - I am sure to make it suitable for those looking for a meatless dish.

There was a dish on the buffet that has not been here on my past visits and it is a dish that I saw for the first time within the past year. They had a "house special pork" which was a pork roast cooked just like the port roast that I have recently written about at another area buffet. This was smaller and was not cooked with the skin on. I tried some and it was tasty but not as good as the "Yummy Pork" that I have written about. (the name is a clue to where that - in my opinion - better pork is served).

You will still find crab legs here. They are not whole clusters but are served as one or two small legs.In the past there has been grilled Italian sausage served on some of the nights that I have come here. There was none on this night - and I don't know if they ever serve it now. There is a large enough variety including non-Asian dishes that it should accommodate most.

Desserts are standard Chinese restaurant desserts but not just the little squares of sheet cake. The apple strudel is not served hot but cut into slices on the dessert counter. The almond cookies, if they are not homemade, taste and have the texture of homemade. They are not the hard cookies often found but a soft but not chewy cookie with good almond flavor.

I have recommended this buffet to many friends and always to my readers. One thing to be aware of is if you are not going here during dinner hours and you are coming for the ribs, call first to make sure they are being served at the time that you come. I have had readers contact me to say that they went for lunch - even on a Sunday and there were no ribs. Before you make the trip - call! (This is try about any buffet. The dinner menu is often more extensive than the lunch menu so always call first if there is one item I talk about here to find out if it will be served when you are going to be there.)

The restaurant is open seven days a week and the hours are until 10 pm on weeknights and 11 on Friday and Saturday. The last dinners are let in up to an hour before closing. There is no website, but the telephone number is 631-543-9583.

Return to Yummy China Buffet, East Meadow, NY

We decided to go back to Yummy China Buffet in East Meadow on Long Island in New York. We had just gotten a circular in the newspaper with their menu stating that their price was $15.99 with free soda - as it had been when we first went a month or so ago. This, that first time, was a sudden reduction in price from the usual $19.99 every day for dinner that this buffet opened for business with a number of months ago. In my first review I mentioned that it was uncertain if this price would remain in effect and that is still uncertain as the advertisement that we just received said that the price was for a limited time and showed it through March. This buffet is priced just right at $15.99 including the soft drink.

So we went back and were very pleased - again - with the meal that we had. For the most part the same dishes were on the buffet with just a few exceptions. We went both times on a Friday night so it may just be that this is the usual Friday night offerings. Everything that we had was good so there really was no disappointment that there were not other dishes that they show on their rotating buffet menu.

The best thing here in my opinion is a dish that they call Yummy Pork and I mentioned this in my first article about this buffet. This is a large piece of pork with the skin on that has been slow roasted to the point that the meat is moist and just pulls apart. The addition of the skin still on and roasted with the meat in whatever seasonings that they are using makes this delicious. I was very happy to see that this was there on the buffet on this second visit.

This time I also went up to the sushi bar to see what would happen if I asked for sushi without rice. There was absolutely no problem having this made for me. The sushi is served at a sushi bar with a chef making sushi to order from a menu - all is included in the price of the buffet. There are various rolls, sashimi, and also platters. The people at the table next to us were ordering sushi platters and they each were given a tray sized platter with various assortments of sushi. The platters have different names on the menu that sits on the counter next to the chef and each is described with what it includes. I ordered a salmon roll without rice. I was told that it would take ten minutes as there were two other orders in ahead of mine. This is the only drawback with this type of sushi service at a buffet as the one chef is doing all of the work to order. It was not a problem and I waited until he put my plate of salmon roll up on the counter for me to take. It was a roll of six pieces and he even  garnished the plate. I went back later for another roll. I was very happy. I can't eat rice - though I would love to - and I love sushi. Getting sushi without rice at a buffet has always been a challenge and I always wind up taking the rice and leaving it on my plate after I eat the fish.

I also tried the baby clams in black bean sauce. These ere very good and I rarely eat cooked, steamed clams. These clams were small, in the shell, and cooked in a very tasty sauce.

My wife commented during the meal that everything tastes like it is supposed to. That may sound like an odd comment but at many Asian buffets, the food is a bit different from what you would get if you went to a non-buffet Asian restaurant. Here the shrimp tastes like shrimp, is not mushy or hard, and has just the correct texture. This is true here for just about all of the dishes.

I had commented in my last article about this buffet that there had been no beef dishes out on the buffet. On this night there was beef with peppers. There was also a full tray of crab legs - which are individual legs and not clusters.

Everything is well tended and served at the correct temperatures. There is someone from the restaurant always checking the buffet and making sure that nothing needs to be replaced. If it does, a new tray come out from the kitchen shortly. The trays that are out are also stirred and not allowed to dry out.

Be aware, as I had suspected in my first article, that the soda served is not name brand. It is fine, it is just not Coke or Pepsi. It is included in the price and that helps to make it OK. 

Service here was again very good. The young lady who took care of our table cleared our dishes promptly and refilled our sodas without our asking.

I am very much hoping that the price here remains at $15.99 including the soda. Soda at buffets is about $1.99 or more in this area so when that comes off the price for comparison, the buffet dinner price becomes $14.00. Other than one buffet near to the location of this buffet, other Asian buffets on Long Island are starting at $14.99 without the soda. So this buffet's price - at this price - is very good for the area.

I feel that starting out with the $19.99 price hurt business at this buffet. On a Friday night, this buffet should have most of its dining room full. While there was a steady turnover of tables less than half of the tables in the small dining room were full. Two of the tables had regulars who the owner knew and came over to chat with several times. All of the employees here are very friendly to everyone! But if people are not coming, I have to wonder why. To start out with a high price and then see a need to lower that price to bring in business means that a lot more advertising needs to be done to let people know of the new price. They did send out this circular in the newspaper but it took them almost two months to do so. The other possible problem is that formerly this was a very run down Chinese buffet and many do not realize that it is under new ownership, far, far cleaner that it had been, and the food is much, much better. Taking over a failing restaurant can be a big problem as the former reputation remains with the location sometimes. I saw this before with a restaurant that was associated with a former restaurant in the same location that had problems. This can be overcome with good word of mouth and a lot of advertising to let everyone know that this is not the restaurant that once was here.

As I was leaving after a fine meal, I started thinking that this buffet has all of the markings of a Top Buffet. The price is the only concern and if it stays where it is at the present time, this buffet could be a best Asian buffet.  We will keep an eye on the price and on the consistency of the restaurant as a whole and see.

I do recommend Yummy China Buffet and Sushi Restaurant. Try it if you are in this area!

The Yummy China Buffet and Sushi Restaurant is located at 398 Merrick Avenue, East Meadow, New York 11554. The telephone number is 516-486-2525. There is no website. The restaurant is open from Tuesday to Sunday from 11:30 am to 10:00 pm. Prices are the same for weekdays and weekends. The lunch price is less. The restaurant is closed on Mondays.

Minado Japanese Seafood Buffet, Carle Place, New York

It has been about two years since I have written about Minado Japanese Seafood Buffet. This is a buffet that we go to just once a year for a special occasion. While it is not astronomically expensive, it is the most expensive buffet that we go to at $29.99 per person for dinner on a weeknight. The dinner buffet is $31.85 Friday to Sunday. It is also the most different buffet that we go to. It is all Japanese from the freshest sushi that I have had at any buffet to green tea ice cream as part of an extensive selection of desserts. On a very limited dining out budget and with my wife who does not eat seafood other than shrimp, this buffet restaurant has to be good for us to spend the money and keep going back - even if that is only once each year.

Minado is part of a group of several locations in New York and New Jersey. Some are called Minado and some are called Nori Nori. What was interesting on this night that I had not seen here before was that inside there was a mix of signs - some saying Minado and others saying Nori Nori. The sign outside over the restaurant still read Minado. Even some of the plates had the Nori Nori name on them. 

We went on a Thursday night. The restaurant was not crowded but it was busy. We were seated at a small table for four. The table was just about right for the two of us. There were similar tables with four at them but they had to feel cramped. There are much larger tables for big groups and also private party rooms.

As we usually do, we started the dinner with soup. There are typical Chinese restaurant soups such as wonton, egg drop, and hot and sour. There is Japanese miso soup. But my soup of choice here is Udon noodle soup made to order at the corner of the grill area. Here your noodles are heated in boiling water, added to broth, and then you are asked which or all of the ingredients out before the chef you would like added to your soup. I get them all - though I have no idea what some of them are. The most recognizable are tempura shrimp and two very large shrimp were placed on top of my soup with all of the rest of the ingredients. There are other types of noodles to choose also. I love this traditional soup and I have not tried anything else here.

Following the soup, I went for sushi while my wife went for dumplings. This is sushi unlike any other that I have had at any other buffet including Japanese buffets. The fish is extremely fresh and tastes as such. The selection of different types is wider than any other that I have seen. There is a selection of all types of fish - some of which I will not try - no raw octopus or squid for me. But if you like it, it is here. There was something different from other years that we have come here. They used to have a selection of different raw fish (sashimi) out on platters on beds of ice - just fish. Instead of this, there were small plates each containing a piece of raw salmon, a piece of raw tuna, and a piece of some unknown to me white in color raw fish. There was a mild marinade on top and some had a few small pieces of lettuce salad that they were sitting on - some did not. I try as much as I can - and want to - eat low carb and I have a problem for this reason eating rice. I usually take some sushi rolls and fish on rice, but when there is just raw fish out I take that primarily. It was always nice that there were, in the past, just the fish out on platters each clearly labeled as to what it was. I still do not know what the white in color fish was in the bowls. One piece was so chewy - I am sure it is supposed to be - that I did not finish it. There was another piece of the same in one of the other bowls and that I did eat all of. It would be nice to know what it was. I had taken yellowtail tuna on rice so I know it was not that. I also took red snapper on rice and it was not that. Part of eating here for us is trying new things. I certainly tried some fish that I have not had before. One thing here that tells me that this fish is of a different and higher quality than sushi that I have had at other buffets is the color, the greater flavor, and the texture. The red tuna is dark red/brown. If you wish, you could easily make the whole meal here sushi. There is so much more that I move after one or two plates to the so many other things that are here to choose from.

There is a cold seafood bar with crab legs, clams, and oysters. The oysters are covered in a light, thin sauce with some greens and a thin slice of lemon added on top. In front of the oysters there was a tub of a thin red liquid and all of the Asian people taking oysters were spooning this sauce on top. I usually put cocktail sauce on my raw oysters - and there was cocktail sauce by the cold steamed shrimp that were also out - but I thought that I would try my oysters as the others were eating them - and I spooned some of the red liquid on top also. I was halfway back to the table when I realized that this red liquid must contain hot sauce. For some reason that has not occurred to me - silly me! I had five raw oysters in there shells now swimming in this, and I was not going to let them go to waste. The oysters were actually the only thing out on the entire buffet with a line to get to them. OK. I got back to the table and I poured off as much of the sauce as I could from each oyster. It was a good thing that I did because the little that remained set my mouth burning. My mistake that I must remember the next time that I go. Even with the hot sauce, the oysters were good - and tasted very fresh.

After the oysters, I went to the long row of prepared Japanese salads that are out. These are an assortment of salads made of various vegetables, lettuce, some with raw fish, some with noodles, some with various seaweed. There was Hijiki with Shitake Mushrooms that is a type of dried seaweed mixed with the mushrooms and with a light dressing. It has a consistency and look unlike anything else and it tastes a little nutty, is slightly crunchy, and we both like it. This is saying a lot because my wife rarely eats anything with a dressing on it. There was raw beef, smoked salmon, raw salmon in a cilantro dressing. There was a noodle salad. All of it different and good. Again, I could have gone back and made my meal just these salads, but still there is so much more.

There are various appetizers. There are meats and shrimp skewered on sticks and flame grilled. There is slices of large beef ribs - sliced across the ribs including bones from several ribs - flame grilled. There were Japanese dumplings with pork and a shrimp dumping. There are tempura shrimp and vegetables. All continually being refilled.

Then there is a long row of entree dishes. The selections change each day from a list of dishes that may be found on their website. The website is linked on the side of this page and you can look there at the menu to see what may or may not be there on the night that you come. I enjoyed Japanese crab cakes, soba noodles, some of the whole pollock steamed in ginger, chicken teriyaki that was not the usual cubed chicken with thick sweet sauce poured over it - but large pieces of chicken cut from the bone with a mild teriyaki sauce that allowed the flavor of the chicken to come through, B.B.Q pork ribs that were unusual in that they had a just slightly sweet sauce on them but the bone seemed to be missing yet the usual grizzle end of the rib was there, and I had more. The ribs were tasty and different. It was all good. When I was younger I could eat so much more than I can now at a buffet. When I am here I wish that I could eat like I did then before I start to feel full.

What I did not have at this dinner was the hibachi grill. It was there and it was making hibachi beef steak and hibachi chicken breasts with large slices of onion and zucchini, grilled on a flat grill. I have always enjoyed this - and I was very tempted - but I recalled from other meals here and at other Japanese buffets, that the amount given at the hibachi grill is a meal in itself - a full plate of meat and vegetables. When I have this, I really don't have room to have anything else. I decided that I would skip the hibachi and go for the entrees instead. The hibachi looked good. All that were having it, looked to be enjoying it. Maybe next year. As I keep saying, there is just so much here to choose from, one needs to set some limits to be able to enjoy as much of a variety as possible.

Dessert also brings a lot of choices. There are several fresh fruits out. There are cakes, pastries,and cookies. All looking like the little squares found typically at Asian buffets, but these are not the same as those. The cakes taste like cake - and there was a variety to try. Despite that I should not have, I did take two small squares of cake - one a blueberry cake and the other green tea cake. The blueberry cake was the tastier of the two. The green tea cake was fine but the idea of it was better than it was. I also took some of the green tea ice cream with is in the soft serve machine. This was good. I have had it before. It is mildly sweet and very refreshing. You can taste the tea, and it draws you to keep eating it and go back for more. I was satisfied with the small swirl that I took. There is also cooked to order crepes. These looked wonderful! I have tried one here in the past and it is good. The crepes come with your choice of toppings and if you want to take it over to the soft serve machine and put vanilla or green tea ice cream or both on top, go right ahead!

I think that you can tell that I enjoyed this meal. My picky eater wife was very happy also. She found plenty that was not fish. This is one of those buffet meals that we both happily finish by saying "Oh my!"

The service was very good. The soda is extra - and costs $2.49. While this sounds like a lot especially when added on top of a $30 meal, it is only thirty cents more than what OCB is charging for soda now. The restaurant is opened on weeknights until 9:30 on weeknights, 10 on Friday and Saturday and 9 on Sundays. At about 9:00 pm on this Thrusday night, our server came to the table to tell us that if we wanted anything more from the grill or if we wanted crepes we needed to go and get them then as those stations would be starting to close. That is fair, and everything else was still being served.

Now, I have said this before about this particular location of this buffet - for a Japanese buffet, many of the servers are Japanese (or Asian), all of the sushi chefs behind the sushi counters are Japanese, but the rest of the cooking staff - at the grill, the crepes, and coming from the kitchen are Hispanic. This is a heavily Hispanic area and perhaps that is why. I just find that odd - but locally it is not unusual.

I very much recommend this buffet. Remember it is a lot more expensive than the buffets I usually recommend to you. The lunch price is less (about $10 less - so still a $20 lunch for one) so if you want to try it for less you might try lunch.

Minado Japanese Seafood Buffet is located at 219 Glen Cove Rd, Carle Place, New York. Their telephone number is 516-294-9541. There is a website and the link is at the side of this page. Hours may always vary from location to location so check on the website before you go. On the website you will find details for all of the locations.

China Buffet, East Meadow, New York

I have been to the China Buffet many times but not since the opening of Chen's Buffet in Levittown, New York. This seems to be the case for many of China Buffet's customers. Many have started going to Chen's. My last article about China buffet was in January, 2010. Chen's opened just about a year after that and took away much of the little business that this buffet had. Chen's has become more and more difficult to park for. They have a very large parking lot in the rear but it is used also by patrons of the bar next door and fills and stays full. We decided to go back to China Buffet and see if they have made any improvements to try to compete with Chen's to bring back their customers.

We went on a Saturday night. It was cold and windy but the sky was clear. The restaurant was almost empty. The immediate change is that the weekend price is now $8.99 per adult. The weekday price is $7.99. They have changed the light bulbs also as the room is now brightly lit and a lot more appealing than it had been though the tables and decor has not changed. There were perhaps four other tables filled in the entire restaurant.

We went up to the buffet and started with soup. There were the same three standard soups that they have always served. There was clear soup for wontons, egg drop soup, and hot and sour soup. My wife took the wonton soup and I took the egg drop soup and added two wontons. The wontons were large and full of meat. They were served in a tray along side the soup and were moist in the pan. This seemed to me to be a good sign starting out.

The soup was properly seasoned - meaning not too salty - and the wontons were pretty good. The soup could have been hotter, but was OK, and later someone who came in sitting a table near by made a comment that the egg drop soup was now cold.

After the soup, my wife went up for dumplings and I went to take some of the peel and eat shrimp. The shrimp was on ice and next to it there were raw half clams. There was cocktail sauce in a bowl and also a bowl of lemons. The cocktail sauce was very thin and sweet. The shrimp was fine. Just what you would expect. The shrimp were not large, but that did not matter.  My wife took the pan fried dumplings. They were a bit greasy sitting in the pan.

Gone are the crab legs that were once served here. You are not going to get crab legs for $8.99 a person at a buffet. Also gone were a number of dishes and some dishes had changed somewhat in consistency. The shrimp in lobster sauce was in an extremely thin sauce and I could not see any shrimp in the serving tray. There were basically four wok entree dishes including the shrimp with lobster sauce - chicken and broccoli, beef and peppers, bourbon chicken. There was a variety of appetizer items including nicely stuffed egg rolls but these were wrapped in thin wrappers and when fried soaked up oil like a sponge, chicken on a stick. boneless ribs in thick red sweet sauce, cheese stuffed wontons, fried shrimp, stuffed clams, a stuffed bun that was covered in baked mayonnaise that had just cooked carrots and corn inside, and fried chicken legs. The chicken legs were large and looked good. They turned out to be overly fried with some of the meat not easily coming away from the bone and parts totally inedible (this was one of the better things that I had). There was white rice in a steamer and also fried rice in a steamer. I am not sure why the fried rice would be in a steamer and not on a serving tray as it is usually served at buffets. There was egg foo young and egg foo young sauce. Both the patties and the sauce were cold and there was a bit of a vinegar tang to the sauce which made me wonder if it was actually safe to eat. There was a tray of fried fish that looked good but was so chewy that I could not really eat it. There was also a tray of fried calamari that looked like the fish that I decided to stay away from. There was a tray of lo mien. A lot of what I chose was more chewy than it should have been, including the lo mien. Temperatures were also just marginal.

With the few people in the restaurant one would think that there should be no problem keeping the serving trays full but when a tray emptied, it did not get refilled. This was not late and the restaurant had hours to go before it would close. Every so often someone would come out to fill in an empty tray, but there were too many empty or near empty trays of food. There was also a problem, it seemed, keeping food tended. I went past the condiments - duck sauce, Chinese mustard and such. The top of the mustard dish was dried and crusted over.

We both wondered how do they stay in business. There were far from enough people on a Saturday night to keep the place open. We wondered if they do a big lunch business, but where they are located- not really near any large businesses, I am not sure where a big lunch business would come from. Do they get an earlier than 7:00 pm crowd? I don't know. Or are they just holding on and aside from their now year long competition, they are not cooking in a way to keep people coming in once they have been back for a try - as we were.

I have not mentioned the "hibachi" grill - which has always been in the back of this restaurant. It was never especially good. There was no one cooking back there. There was a counter set up with raw vegetables, thawed out chicken, and small shrimp. The meat and shrimp did not look appetizing and I decided that I was not going to try anything there. No one while we were there went up to that grill. Unless you turned the corner to see the counter with the raw food you would have just assumed it was closed. One of the big features at Chen's is the hibachi grill and this was where this restaurant could have competed if they really wanted to. Obviously - at least now - they had no interest.

Desserts consisted of two types of small squares of sheet cake, cantaloupe that look over ripe or having sat too long, chocolate pudding, fried dough balls, hot apple strudel, orange wedges, an ice cream freeze with hard ice cream in the back where it could not be seen, and almond cookies. The almond cookies actually looked good. We each took one. My wife commented that this cookie was the best part of the meal. It was soft and had a good taste. I agreed that it was the best part of the meal.

Service was good. The plates were taken away quickly. Our drinks (soda is $1.00) were refilled without our asking. The soda, by the way, is neither Coke or Pepsi. They have always had some off brand cola here. The room was mostly clean. The table in the booth next to us was being held supposedly straight by a stack of napkins under one of the legs. As it was, the table sat on a odd angle.

I came with hopes. I can't say that it was even as good as it used to be. It is not. After the meal we are not ill - good point for the restaurant - but there was definitely too much MSG in the food as my wife who this does not bother is complaining about it. It is almost five hours later and I am still tasting the grease in my throat.

I don't recommend it unless you want a really cheaply priced Chinese buffet meal and don't really care about how the food is. If you want a lot of cold peel and eat shrimp for little money then you might want to come here.

The China Buffet is located at 394 Merrick Ave, East Meadow, New York and the phone number is (516) 489-2525.

Christmas/New Year's Special Dinner at Best Buffet, Huntington Station, NY

I am pushing this article ahead of other articles that are scheduled to appear on this site, as I want to give those who would like to try this special dinner a chance to get there for New Year's Eve 2012 or New Year's Day 2013. We have been to the very special Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day dinner at Best Buffet located in Huntington Station, New York last year and the year before on Christmas Day. We returned there again this year and were very pleased. Last year, and prior, at this restaurant there had been temperature problems with the food. There was no such problem this year and everything that I tried was very, very good!

This is a Chinese/Asian buffet and it is one of the highest priced such buffets in this area. The price for this special holiday dinner is $33.99 per person - the same as it was last year. This is the most expensive buffet dinner that I have been to and written about. It is way above most of the buffets that I recommend. This price is just for this special holiday dinner, but it is not much more than their usual weekend dinner. For a holiday dinner- we are talking about the biggie holidays here - it is not that bad. If you want soda or tea you will be charged $1.79 each more. They will automatically add a 12% tip onto the bill in addition to sales tax.  The children's price is $16.99!  The bill for the two of us without beverages - just water - was over $84.00. For us that is a lot - but I enjoyed the meal and that is what is important!

There are usually over 180 items on their buffet at dinner. This special meal is adding a number of special items to this - you will find:

Special Seafood bisque - this was a very unusual soup and unlike any bisque that I have ever had. It was a dark brown similar to hot and sour soup but not spicy. It had chunks of seafood - not sure what but some had the consistency of shrimp and lobster. It also had gelatinous noodles which may be soybean noodles. It was interesting and good.

Tokyo Beef Shortrib - this was a large roasted beef rib carved at the carving station. It was carved off the bone and placed on your plate. It was very rare at the center and crispy at the edge. It was very good.

Lobster Salad with Tropical Fruit - this was on the cold bar with the salads and fruit. It was white in color and it was pieces of lobster and fruit. As I have to watch which raw fruit I eat due to allergies I did not try it. I wished I could have!

Roast Suckling Pig - they have had this each year. This year it was on the carving station and you took it yourself. It was inch wide strips of pork with a very crisp skin and each strip was about three inches long. Unlike year's past, it was hot and very good. The skin is very hard to bite. It is worth trying!

Grilled Stuffed Clam - this was a half calm that was grilled with bacon on top. It was overly salty to the taste and the clam was very, very chewy. I tried one but did not go back for another.

Fillet Mignon with Pepper Cone - this was a large roll of Fillet Mignon that was roasted with a pepper cream sauce on top. It was very good and very tender. It was served and carved at the carving station.

Alaska Jumbo Crab Legs - these were single legs - not clusters and not very jumbo. There were both hot and cold crab legs. Mixed in were also steamed lobster claws.

Fresh Oysters and Clams - raw oysters and clams on ice next to the sushi bar. The oysters were large and tasty. I added cocktail sauce. There were several types of sauce to top them with.

Grilled Lamb Leg with Rosemary Sauce - served on the carving station.

Pan Fried Fresh Scallop - these were served at the grill and they had a dark sauce on them and they were served on a large scallop shell. The scallop was tender and very tasty!

Grilled Lobster with Cheese - these were half lobsters - small with no claw. Mostly you are eating the tail as there was no meat in the rest of the half shell. The lobster was tasty. There was always a line when these lobsters came out and they were served at the carving station at one per plate. When these lobsters were not out, there was lobster in ginger sauce served to your plate in a good quantity. The lobster in ginger sauce was tastier.

Italian Seafood Platter - I have to say I have no idea what this is - I did not see anything there that would meet this discription, but there was seafood everywhere on the buffet!

Salmon Fish with Dijon Sauce - there was a large salmon on the buffet. I am not partial to cooked salmon so I did not try it.

Jumbo Shrimp Scampi- these were large shrimp in garlic sauce. They looked very good.

Teriyaki Chilean Sea Bass - this was on the buffet and was very popular, especially with the Oriental people who were dining. Large chunks of Chilean sea bass were covered in a thick teriyaki sauce.

Roasted Peking Duck - this is always offered at the carving station here. The duck was large and meaty - and surprisingly not very fatty. Duck was carved and put in a thick, doughy steamed pancake and there were the traditional toppings and sauce for you to add yourself. There was no problem just carving several good sized pieces of duck to your plate.

Japanese Sushi and Sashimi - there is always a sushi bar here and there was a good variety of fish being offered. While I was at the sushi counter, one gentleman was asking for a certain roll and they were making it for him.

Seafood Delight with X.O. Sauce - this was no the buffet. I did not try it.

Roasted Prime Rib - this was on the carving station and they were carving thick slices of prime rib. This was real prime rib - not just roast beef. There were slices on the bone. The meat looked moist.

Fried Oysters with Wasabi - this was on the buffet. While I like raw oysters, I do not care for cooked oysters. If you like cooked oysters, these would be good.

Crispy Prawns with Mayonnaise - this was on the buffer. I did not try it.

Holiday Dessert - there was a variety of desserts with the most authentic being two Chinese dessert soups. There were cups of mango pudding, honeydew pudding, and chocolate pudding. There was a sign for creme brulee but there was no out. There were the usual Chinese buffet sheet cakes, a variety of cookies and macaroons, a coconut cake (which was gelatinous), kiwi fruit, something called Dragon Fruit which was red on the outside, white inside with black seeds, fruit salad, apple pie roll, and a sundae bar with soft serve ice cream. I tried a small piece of cheese cake which was not much more than the usual cheese cake found with the sheet cakes at many Chinese buffets. It was fine but not great cheese cake. I also tried something that looked like it should be a very thin chocolate cookie. A platter came out with very thin cookies in random shapes as a batter must have been poured out as liquid onto the baking sheet. There were the shapes of almonds (inside) bumped across the pieces. It looked like a chocolate cookie. It was hard to the bite and it did not really taste like chocolate. When you bit into the bump where the almond shape was it tasted like almond but no almond could be seen. It was very unusual - and without the chocolate taste was not really worth finishing.

These were the holiday features. In addition there were many other things to eat - some of which is found on their regular and weekend buffet and some not. There were two soup pots on the side near the carving station. One had duck soup. The other had spare rib soup. There were a variety of meets and seafood coming off the grill - beef, chicken, shrimp, octopus, and more. There were three dumplings - traditional shumai, a shumai stuffed with wild black rice, and pan fried pork dumplings. There were non-Asian foods like Fettuccine Alfredo (which was very good) and Chicken Marsala. They also have an hibachi grill now that they did not have in the past and there were raw meats and vegetables for you to choose and give to the chef to grill for you. There were many, many good things to choose.

The only problem is that there is so much, it is not possible to take even a small amount of everything that you would like to try. I tried to just take a little of what I wanted to try and still could not include everything that caught my eye. One thing that I had that is worth mentioning - along with so much else - was sweet and sour cod fish. The tray had a whole fried cod including head with bared teeth. There were large chunks of fried cod that were continually added to this tray and they were covered in a light sweet and sour sauce that was not the usual red sweet and sour sauce you usually get in a Chinese restaurant. This was very good. So much was very good.

When we were almost finished, my wife asked if I felt (pertaining to value) if this meal here or the meal at Captain George's Seafood Buffet in Virginia was better. That was a hard question to answer and she choose that buffet to compare to as it is the closest (though cheaper) to the price of this buffet. My answer was this meal and I based that answer on the carving station. Here you could make a meal of Prime Rib, Leg of Lamb, Fillet Mignon, Short Rib, Duck, and two types of lobster. And not include anything else. There is no place (at least locally) that you can do that for $34.00 - and the food was quality.

I do this holiday buffet once a year. It was a nice holiday dinner. I recommend that you try it and as New Year's Eve and New Year's Day is next week you still have an opportunity to go here and also enjoy this meal. Otherwise you have to wait until next year's holidays.

Best Buffet is located on Route 110 North - 179 Walt Whitman Road in Huntington Station, New York on Long Island. Their phone number is 631-385-0800. There is a website and that is linked at the side of this page.

Another Try at Peking Restaurant, Williamsburg, Virginia

In October 2011 and then again in February 2012, I wrote about an Asian buffet restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia that had been one of our favorites. It is the Peking Restaurant and in 2007 it received a Best Buffet award from this site. Before October 2011 we had not been back to this area in several years and when we returned we expected to find this favorite buffet just as it always had been. It was not. You can go back and read the articles in October and February. I am not linking them here because I want to associate this article with the negative experiences that we had in those articles. I will say that after the last visit written about in February we decided that we would not go back to the Peking Buffet.

Since then I have learned what happened there. The general manager who had been there all along was no longer there - apparently, not by his choosing. He did go to open another buffet restaurant in the area which I have written about - Wasabi - and that buffet was very good. I have said on this site many times that the manager can make or break a restaurant - and especially a buffet! We are experiencing this with another buffet that we frequent whose excellent manager was let go for unknown reasons and the good buffet has nose-dived to barely a fair buffet. Others who liked Peking Buffet also noticed what I did last year and agreed with me. Things were not good there anymore.

We found ourselves in Williamsburg, Virginia again recently - as those of you who are regular readers know from the recent Williamsburg buffet articles. We had intended to have more than one dinner at Wasabi - the restaurant that the former Peking Buffet manager opened. We we got there we found Wasabi closed. There were advertisements everywhere for Wasabi. The building was dark and a sign on the door indicated renovations were being done. What I later learned was that the owner - the man from Peking Buffet - was made an offer by a Virginia "name" chef to buy him out, which he did and the owner left the US to go to Taiwan. Perhaps good for him, but not so great for those of us who really liked his buffet. The new restaurant that has opened at Wasabi's location is not a buffet and an up-scale Oriental menu restaurant with high prices.

So, I told you all that to get to this. We got to a point that we did not know where to go for dinner. We had been to the other buffets enough and could not really afford the menu restaurants around town other than the chains and did not want to do that. My wife, with reluctance, said to me do you want to try Peking Buffet again? My first response was no. I thought about it and found myself driving to Peking Buffet. I knew that nothing really would have changed there, but perhaps someone there read one of my more recent articles and maybe it might be different.

In terms of layout and serving areas, everything is the same.  One of the things to understand about the food here as I, personally, am concerned, is that on the buffet now there are an overwhelming number of items on the buffet that are either very sweet or extra hot and spicy. There are dishes that I can take at other Chinese buffets and not have a problem with, that I cannot take here because they are over-spiced. Some may find this as a good thing. I want to taste the food and not the spiced heat. Going up to the buffet for food, I had to be sure to select things that I was going to be OK eating. My wife, as the regular readers know, only eats "plain" foods - not just not spicy but beyond that. I decided that I would follow what she was taking and eat similarly - and perhaps I would have a better experience here than I have had on my last two visits.

We started with the noodle soup station which will create a soup to your order using any of several noodle types. This has always been good here - and was equally good on our last two visits. We like Vietnamese pho soup and that is what we had the soup chef at the counter make for us. It was good - it always has been good.  It still is.

I moved on to the "Sushi Train" which in my last two articles I explained is a moving counter with sushi on plates that move past you and you take the plates that you want. This concept does not work well at a buffet. First, you can stand there an overly long time waiting for something that went past to come back around again. Second, if you want five pieces of sushi, you are picking up five small plates. How are you supposed to carry all of these small plates back to your table. There are no trays. I went up with a large plate. I had decided that I would do one of two things. I would either take a small plate and dump the contents onto my large plate - and then have to get rid of the small plate - or I would use the large plate as a tray to carry the small plates stacked up. I went with the plate as a tray idea as I decided it would be rude to stack the little plates up on their counter and leave them. It would make a statement to how this idea does not work, but I would not do that. I took several plates of sushi and carried them back carefully on top of a dinner plate. The variety of sushi is broad. It is not well labeled and it is often a surprise when you find out that what you thought you were taking is not at all that. They have enough area to make a nice sushi serving area - but they continue with this "train" idea.


I went on to main courses and side dishes. I completely skipped the Thai section. These are beyond hot and spicy. The Japanese hibachi area is serving teriyaki and that is also made spicy. I am not sure why. I skipped that as well. There were some dumplings, noodle dishes, and rice dishes there that were fine. On the main buffet server between the Mongolian BBQ and the Japanese hibachi, there was a mix of standard Chinese dishes such as chicken and broccoli, pepper steak, and the like and then a number of hot and spicy dishes, and then a number of sweet dishes. As I said, I watched my wife and chose dishes that were plain to mild. One dish looked plain enough until you saw that the pan was lined with chili peppers. But there at least were things this time that were there to take that were not spicy. If you like sweet, there were a number of dishes cooked in sweet sauces.

I also went over to the Mongolian BBQ and remembering my last visit I made my plate up of meat - I took chicken - there was also beef, pork, lamb, and shrimp - and raw shredded vegetables and bean sprouts and put none of the sauces that were there on top. The sauces - even those that should not be  - are spicy. This was cooked for me and when I got back to the table I added soy sauce to moisten it. As I had it made, it was fine for me. Again, if you like hot and spicy, you can go to town with mixing the sauces that are out to have your meat and vegetables cooked in.

On one side of the round Mongolian grill serving counter there is a cold section and there were steamed shrimp on ice there. These shrimp are served with the heads on. This is how they would be served in the Orient. Most Americans don't like to see shrimp with the heads on. If you break off the head, it is just the same as the cocktail shrimp you usually fine.

The desserts here are typical Asian buffet desserts - little squares of cake, fruit, ice cream. One does not go to an Asian buffet for the desserts.

The restaurant is clean. Service is fine. At this meal we both had enough to eat. I did not feel hungry after we were through and we were both fine. I was able to find enough to eat this time even being careful in what I was choosing.  Overall, this was a much better experience than we had on the last two visits and meals eaten here.

Would I go back?  On this experience, I would go back and likely, will. Do I recommend Peking Restaurant? After your reading what I have written here in regard to the level of spice used and the types of foods that you will encounter, if you like spicy and/or sweet - or if you have no problem with picking and choosing to find what you can that is on the plain side, then yes, try it. I eat at a lot of Asian buffets. I have not had to pick carefully at any other as I find I have to here. Again, this is me - and there are others out there just like me. If you have food restrictions, it gets a little harder.  I do miss the Peking Restaurant that I once knew. There was a far wider variety of foods and the emphasis did not used to be on spicy and sweet.

The price of dinner here is $11.99. Lunch is $7.99. Thai food is only brought out after 4;30 pm. Sushi is served after noon. Soft drinks with refills are additional. The restaurant is open 7 days a week. Unlike many family buffets, there is a full service liquor bar.

The Peking Restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia is located at 120 Waller Mill Road in the Big Kmart Shopping Center. (Kingsgate Green Shopping Center – Bypass Road (Rt.60)). There is a website and that is listed at this side of the page.

A Tale Of Two Golden Corrals - Virginia PART II

In Part I I wrote about our not so great experience at the Williamsburg, Virginia Golden Corral. That night we got on the computer and looked for Golden Corrals in that area. The next nearest Golden Corral is in Newport News, Virginia. After that the next one was in Hampton Roads. We had been to the Golden Corral in Hampton Roads many years ago. It was nice, but Newport News was closer and straight down I64 and right off the exit in a shopping center. We decided that we would go there on one of the nights of this trip.

The Newport News Golden Corral was easy to find. The trip from Williamsburg was not that long. It is located in the parking lot of a shopping center with several stores. The shopping center was quite spread out and there was plenty of parking for the restaurant which stands alone in a corner of one of the parking lots. You are pretty much out of the tourist areas here and you are at this restaurant with local people - which can be a very good thing.

We parked and went inside to find a Golden Corral with what I am going to describe as a "normal" Golden Corral layout. The dining rooms across one side of the restaurant and the buffet server in one long row spread out across the rear wall of the restaurant. We paid and seated ourselves. At Golden Corral you pay as you enter and you order your drink at the cashier who then gives you the drink to take to your table. Refills are done by your server.

The restaurant was large and the tables were nicely spaced - typical of most Golden Corrals with the exception of the Williamsburg location.We seated ourselves and went right up to the buffet. As I said, this is the typical Golden Corral buffet layout. The buffet spreads across the entire rear wall of the restaurant in one long line of serving areas. The salad bar starts at one end and the hot foods then carry along. Here - unlike Williamsburg - there was a Chinese station with four serving trays of Chinese food. The hot buffet continues along with a bump out for the grill and here the grill is out enough in the open that there is plenty of room to be able to wait for your steak to be cooked as you like it without holding up others who want their steak differently. The hot buffet continues around and along with the bakery next - a selection of hot breads and rolls - and then this connects to the dessert section with its broad variety.

Here there were no bottlenecks. There was no confusion. There was no waiting on lines just to get up to a serving tray of food.

The buffet also still had the seafood saute, but here it did not interfere with any other part of the buffet - including the grill which it is located next to. There were a few people getting that - and this does involve a wait on line because each person's dish is cooked to order and they can do one or two at the most at one time.

This Golden Corral also had the Tropical Grill feature - and just to see if it would be any different than my taste at Williamsburg, I took a very little bit to try. I did not like it here any more than I did there. I know that by now this feature is gone - as a new one has been announced -but if you did not like spicy or sweet, this was not for you (or me).

I just mentioned a new feature and that feature may have been getting its start in both of these Virginia Golden Corrals - though had I just gone to Williamsburg and not Newport News, I would not have realized that now. The new feature is Carvers - various meats being carved including a whole turkey. In Williamsburg, there had been the remains of what had been a whole turkey. What was left - and what had not been replaced with another turkey, was the carcass of a turkey with some remaining shreds of meat on the side. In Newport News there was almost a whole turkey to be carved - obviously recently brought out. They could have done a better job of having someone there to carve it but all it really took was getting someone's attention that was behind this counter near the grill and ask for a piece, and you would get a slice or a part like a drumstick if you asked for it. This seems to be what the new feature is all about - and if I can get to another Golden Corral before this feature ends, I will let you all know more about it.

I have to also mention that they had some really good ribs here. There were no ribs at the Williamsburg location. These were tasty and close to fall off the bone ribs. Also, like at another buffet that I wrote about in Virginia recently, there was baked spaghetti on the buffet here. I had said this about this dish at the other buffet - this must be something local because I have never seen it anywhere other than in these Virginia buffets. Baked Spaghetti is like  baked lasagna using spaghetti. It is spaghetti mixed with tomato sauce and mixed with cheese and then covered with cheese and baked. It is actually quite tasty.

We had a very enjoyable and relaxed meal here. Service was good on this first night - it had been marginally fair in Williamsburg. I am not going to talk about price as prices seem to vary by area. It can be $9.99 and it can be $10.99. I do not believe it can be higher than that - price is something that Golden Corral advertises about. The soft drinks with refills are additional and this was a bit high  for sodas - $2.09 per person.

We wound up making the trip a second time to Newport News to go to this Golden Corral again during this trip. I might have made a better choice than I did of tables as this server was just OK - and she wound up leaving during the middle of our meal - and her replacement was much better. And while she was still our server I could see other servers really hustling around doing their jobs and she was very casual about it spending more time on her cell phone hiding near the soda machine than working her tables. Her replacement was a pleasure.

We would have gone back a third time, but as I said in Part I, there was a storm that badly flooded Newport News that day, and we were not going to chance going into that.

Our next trip to Williamsburg - and we go there often - we will be making the drive to Newport News when we want to dine at Golden Corral. If you are in this area or going to this area, I suggest that you do the same!

Chen's Buffet City, Levittown, New York

A new Asian buffet has opened on Long Island, New York. It opened in mid-December with great anticipation. I watched for months the location be transformed from a large, empty storefront that years ago was once a chain drugstore to a new buffet restaurant. The location is actually directly across the way from the Old Country Buffet. Each time we passed we wondered when it would open. Just about when it looked like it was open, we called and were told "next week", and then that next week we called again, only to be told again "next week". It finally opened and it has had large crowds ever since. I have actually been there five times at this point - so many things were happening in December that I just did not have a chance to write this article - and we kept going back.

Chen's Buffet City is a combination of Chinese buffet and Japanese hibachi/sushi. If you look on their website, they call themselves a Japanese buffet, but they are not really. Other than the hibachi grill and the sushi bar, this is a Chinese buffet. Most of the dishes on the buffet are Chinese.

Since I have gone back so many times in just a short time, it is clear that I like this buffet. The food is good. There are a few problems that I will go into later but know up front that this is a good buffet. The dining room is large with a combination of booths and tables. The buffet servers are in the rear of the room with eight large double sided buffet servers. Half of the back wall is the hibachi grill and the other half is the sushi bar. There is a small lobby when you come in and the only nights that we did not wait for a table were weeknights. We have been there two weeknights, two Friday nights and New Year's Eve. Yes, we went New Year's Eve and they were serving their regular buffet at the regular price. The room that night was packed and we waited almost 45 minutes to get in. When you go in and there is a wait you are given a number that will be called when your table is ready. The numbers are not in sequence and there seems to be a code for the number in your party in the number - so do not be surprised if the numbers are not called in order of the number itself.

The price of the adult buffet at dinner is $11.49! Yes, for all that this buffet has to offer it has the least expensive dinner price of any Oriental buffet on Long Island. This price is the same no matter what night you go - weeknights or weekends. Soda, tea, or ice tea is $1.00 and it is unlimited. Lunch is $7,99 for adults. There are children's prices - dinner - under 2 free, 3-6 $4.99, 7-11 $6.49 - lunch - 3-6 $2.99, 7-11 $4.99. On our first visit after our first glass of Diet Coke (they are not using Coke products- I suspect they are an off brand) they ran out of Diet Coke- they came back to say so and that they will bring regular Coke- no, no we told them we can't drink that and need something without sugar - we settled on hot tea for my wife and iced tea for me- they were trying and since they had just opened they were not anticipating the crowds or the amount of Diet Coke that is consumed at Chinese buffets. This has not happened since.

There is a large salad bar with a variety of Asian prepared salads, lettuce and salad toppings. If you want salad you will not be disappointed. I don't find a need to have salad at an Asian buffet so I have skipped the salad bar. On the same cold server you will find mounds of peel and eat shrimp, cold mussels, and raw clams. There are also cold stone crabs. No matter what you see in the print advertisements or the home page of their website there are no crab legs. Let me repeat that so that you don't get disappointed when you go - THERE ARE NO CRAB LEGS. There is, next to the shrimp, what looks like crab meat strips - but I am very sure (though I did not sample this) that this is not real crab but the fish Krab substitute. I believe, that they intended to serve snow crab legs, but when they actually opened realized immediately that they could not offer that along with everything else that they have for the price that they are charging. This is not very much a loss unless you are a crab leg fanatic. There is plenty more here.

There are six soups - wonton, egg drop, hot and sour, miso, clam chowder, and chicken vegetable. I like to mix soups - I add a wonton to a mixture of hot and sour and egg drop - I enjoy this because it takes the spice off the hot and sour. The soup has been good every time.

It is hard to describe where to start and what they have because they have so much. There are the usual assortment of Chinese appetizers - small egg rolls, spring rolls, fried crab claws, fried cheese stuffed wontons, wings, chicken on a stick, shrimp balls, deep fried fish dumplings. chicken nuggets, fried plantain, fried squid, seasoned french fries, baked clams, steamed clams and more. There are steamed peach buns, steamed shu mai, steamed crystal dumplings which are sweet, and pan fried dumplings. The dumpling sauce is over by the pan fried dumplings which are another server with entrees. They do have spare ribs - these are the typical Chinese buffet style spare ribs overly covered in thick red sugar sauce.

While my wife will go to the buffet servers and take a selection of the many Chinese entrees, I go over to the hibachi grill. This is the same type of hibachi grill that you will find in a Japanese restaurant or buffet. They do have a wider variety of raw vegetables to add - making it appear like more of a selection found at a Mongolian barbecue grill - but this is not a Mongolian barbecue grill. The meat is what makes the difference. There are good sized steaks here to take, pieces of chicken meat, shrimp, and cross slices of beef ribs. There is also noodles - and these noodles are so long that it is almost impossible to take a portion and put it on your dish without several noodles that go on for feet still coming up from the serving tray. You can take whatever you like on a plate - add the meat on top - some just take meat - some just take vegetables and when it is your turn - and there has always been a line - you hand it to the chef and he puts the meat down on the grill separate from the vegetables and cooks it with the addition of oil, butter, soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, and garlic. Now - I told you that I have been to the restaurant five times. I have been up to the hibachi grill ten times - twice each visit. I have not had my hibachi cooked the same way twice. This is not a good thing. Even the same chef has not cooked it the same way twice. There are usually two chefs at the grill to handle the crowd. Sometimes I have been asked how I would like the steak cooked, sometimes not. Sometimes they add butter, sometimes not. Sometimes they put garlic, sometimes not. Sometimes they add two sauces and sometimes one. When we first went, there was a very skilled hibachi chef at the grill - and a crowd of Asian men behind the grill watching him. Obviously, he was the teacher - and that plate was the best that I have had there so far. He even squeezed an orange onto someone's shrimp. I have not seen that since. The last time we were there, the chef did not even cut up the steak as has always been done before and is usual for hibachi steak - he just cooked it and put it on the plate whole next to the vegetables. There is no consistency in cooking at the hibachi grill - and even though I like it a lot, there needs to be. If you don't want them to add something tell them right away - some understand English better than others, but make yourself known. If you want no fat used - tell them. I will tell you that I have been to a Japanese hibachi since going first to Chen's and I like the hibachi dishes that I have had at Chen's better.

The sushi bar is large but the assortment is small. There are mostly rolls and they are not quick to refill the trays when they are empty- though there are always two sushi chefs standing at the bar. They have put out shrimp, salmon, and tuna on top of rice, but these are taken quickly and then rarely will you see them again. I was a bit surprised on New Years Eve when I went up to the two sushi chefs - at the time there were salmon and tuna on rice out on the buffet - and I asked for just some pieces of tuna and salmon with no rice. I could have easily taken the salmon and tuna on rice that was out and not eaten the rice - as was suggested to me by a man who was passing and heard what happened, but I did not want to waste the rice. Both chefs looked at each other and then looked at me like I had asked them to fly - and said "no!". I asked again, in case there was a language issue - and I got a definite no again. So I took the rice and left it over. I really do not understand this, and it was the first strike this buffet received in my mind.

The selection of entrees is extensive and different ones have shown up replacing others from visit to visit. The first visit there was an excellent shrimp with scallions which has not been there since. There has been a shrimp with lobster sauce that was a thick brown sauce that was very good. Since that time the shrimp and lobster sauce has been the standard light sauce with large pieces of egg white. It is also mixed with krab pieces. The sauce is good and close to the full flavor as to what I have had a Chinese menu restaurants. There has been kung pow chicken on one occasion. There is always chicken and broccoli and beef with peppers. There is a large tray of teriyaki chicken. There is a large tray of egg foo young, but beware of the tray of brown sauce that is behind it because that is not egg foo young sauce - I was suspicious when it was a dark brown. It is beef gravy. (Not good on egg foo young!) There is a beef roast out for you to slice yourself. There is salmon and there is steamed whitefish which was good but it needed ginger sauce. Of course, you will find lo mein and fried rice. There is also steamed brown rice in addition to white rice. There is a large tray of corn on the cob. There is sweet and sour chicken. There is stone crab with ginger sauce. There is a dish with shrimp and corn. There is duck but no fixing to make Peking duck but the pieces of duck are meaty and good. Other dishes that we have seen include salt and pepper shrimp, stuffed mushrooms, spicy chicken, honey chicken, general tso chicken, sesame chicken, coconut shrimp, mussels with oyster sauce, mixed Chinese vegetable, bok choy, baked seafood, baked spinach, beef and cheese casserole, fried shrimp, sealegs with bacon, mushrooms in oyster sauce, garlic shrimp, sauteed green beans. and more. There is pizza, rolls, and garlic bread, too. This is another of those buffets that there is so much that you cannot possibly eat it all at one visit.

Dessert is also more than you will find at most Chinese buffets with a large assortment of fresh fruit, pudding, jello, hard ice cream cups that are found in two freezer cases, little cake squares, cream puffs, cookies, etc. The big dessert feature is a - CHOCOLATE FOUNTAIN! This is totally unsupervised and with all of the other comments that I have made about these in other articles I found a new problem here. First, the selections to dip are marshmallows, pineapple chunks, macaroons, sugar filled wafer cookies, bananas, and apple wedges. The fruit is out in a cold server on the table with the fountain. There are sticks in a cup to take to dip with. There are tongs to take from the serving trays. Now, here is the problem - and this exists at EVERY chocolate fountain You take what you want to dip and put it on a plate. Then you take the wood skewers and with your FINGERS put each item on a stick. The item that has been in your fingers now goes into the chocolate. You might have just as well dipped your fingers in. See the problem. Now, this takes nothing away from Chens - it is no different with other chocolate fountains. But I watched everyone doing this while at Chen's. There is no way to avoid this other than to have a server at the fountain wearing gloves and dipping for you - and that is going to be rare any place (other than Shady Maple where that is done). So please, don't overwhelm the comments section about the chocolate fountain - it has all been said already. If you enjoy chocolate fountains then this is a good one. I tried it here once just to taste the chocolate and it was good chocolate.

After reading this I am sure you are hungry. I am. I mentioned problems at the beginning and I have included a few. One last problem that is consistent time to time is that the food is not kept hot enough on the buffet. It is not cold, but warm. You need to take from the bottom of a tray to be sure you get hot food. I heard about a part of China where food is traditionally served luke-warm and I am starting to wonder if many of these buffet owners come from that province. As I have said before, food on a buffet needs to be kept HOT - not just warm. There is a microwave out in the middle of the buffet with a sign that says to the effect - "if the food is not hot enough for you heat it up". Really? Not an acceptable solution but perhaps the food is not intended to be hot. You will notice that this has NOT kept me from going back.

I very much enjoy this buffet and it is becoming a regular for me. It is a wonderful value and the food is good. I am hoping that with time the crowds will settle down and there will be less of a wait to get in. The OCB across the road must be crying because they have never been this busy.

Perhaps I should not recommend it, because it will mean a longer wait when I go -but I really have to recommend Chen's Buffet City to you. This is a definite try it if you are nearby.

Chen's Buffet is located at 3056 Hempstead Turnpike, Levittown, NY 11756. Their phone number is 516.520-0888. There is a website which is linked at the side of this page. They are open 7 days a week and their hours are:
Lunch Buffet: Monday to Saturday 11:00am-3:30pm
Dinner Buffet: Monday to Saturday 3:30pm-9:30pm
Sunday and Holidays: 11:00 am-9:30pm.

Another Christmas Dinner at Best Buffet, Huntington, New York

I was not sure that I was going to write this article or not, but apparently, Best Buffet, a Chinese buffet in Huntington, New York has a lot of fans who read this site, there have been a lot of comments about Best Buffet on a recent article that has nothing to do with this restaurant. Last year in 2010, we went to Best Buffet for a special Christmas dinner. I wrote an article then about how good it was - and I have been thinking through 2011 that come Christmas we would go back for that special holiday meal again. This dinner is actually served on four nights - Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day. As the holidays, approached I looked to see if it would be offered again, and on their website, I saw that it would be. Our plans for Christmas dinner were then set.

The price of this special dinner has gone up a dollar since last year. A tip of 12% is automatically added to your bill. Soda is unlimited and costs extra - we What is offered on the buffet has slightly changed as well as the Oriental Hot Pot section - Shabu-Shabu is no longer offered at the restaurant and, of course then, no longer included on the meal. This was no great loss, though if you are Asian it may be something that you would miss. For the uninitiated into this type of eating, a lot of raw things that you pick to be boiled for you - this was a bit daunting to try. I did not see it mentioned any longer on their website and I knew that it would not be there this year - which was fine with me.

As I said a year ago, this is a Chinese restaurant that caterers to Chinese people - which is great because they offer many dishes that you will not find in most Chinese restaurants and almost never find at a Chinese buffet. Many of the people dining here are Asian and they appear to be enjoying what they are eating - so I can only assume that it is being prepared authentically. Again, this is a good thing.

Many of the things that I wrote abut last year still hold true. I will focus on some of the things that I had that were different this year and also something that is a bit of a problem. I am going to start with the problem first - and I will preface this by saying that it was not so much of a problem that we did not enjoy the dinner and we were not happy - but, it is a concern. When I first reviewed Best Buffet several years ago when it reopened from its former incarnation - the wonderful, East Buffet, the food that was being served on the buffet tables and at the grill area was not hot - in fact, then it was cold. For that reason (and the high meal price of this restaurant) we did not go back. When we did go back a year ago with my fingers crossed that this had been corrected, I was happy to see that it was. This year was another story - and the food was not cold but just warm. This is not good. First, things that are fatty are terrible if they are not hot. Second, it is not safe to not keep food being served at the correct temperature. It was not that the restaurant was empty and that food was sitting. The restaurant was crowed with diners and food was being put out repeatedly - but not hot. It is a problem, and Best needs to correct this. If the Board of Health came in as a surprise and put a food thermometer into the serving trays, there would be violations of health code to answer. I am sure that I will go back again, and hopefully again, they will have corrected this. You know, if you don't put out your best on a special meal like this - well, it is just wrong. Now that I have gotten this out of the way, I will tell you about the meal - and really, we had a good time.

There were several soups on the main buffet server - Lobster Bisque was there again, as it had been last year. It was, though, better last year as it was thicker and there was good pieces of lobster in the soup - last year. This year there was no lobster to be seen in the soup but it had a good lobster taste. Despite the lack of chunks of lobster the soup was good. Later in the meal I saw that there was two other soup servers against a small side wall next to the carving area with two very Chinese soups. I tried the Duck Soup. I knew it was a Marx Brothers movie, but I never saw duck soup served anywhere before. The duck soup was a thin duck broth with pieces of duck in it. It is a simple soup, a little on the fatty side, but it has a solid duck taste. It was an experience.

Last year I said that there was a sign for lobster but on lobster was served other than steamed lobster claws mixed in with the crab legs. This year there was lobster in ginger sauce served at the carving station - and this is good because when this is served at buffets that you go up and take it yourself, there is always a line waiting for it to be refilled and the first three people on the line take all of it. Here, the man behind the counter filled a plate for you - and mostly good tail pieces. No big crowds and fairly distributed portions of lobster. It was very tasty. There was also half lobsters covered with slices of cheese and grilled under a broiler. These were cooked on demand - you asked for one and a grill chef prepared it and put it under the grill. When done, it was placed on your plate. This was good but tended to be dry. Again, as last year there were steamed lobster claws.

There was roast suckling pig again this year. It is cut up into small pieces and served on a hot tray - not hot enough though. It would have been better had it been really hot, but it was OK warm. Looking back at my review from last year, the pig also was just warm then.

There were several carvings - and all looked good! There was ham, turkey (a real turkey), Peking duck, Prime Rib, and Fillet Mignon. There was a chef preparing the Peking Duck in the traditional style or you could just ask for pieces of duck. The duck was crispy and good.

There is an extensive sushi bar that includes pieces of raw fish without rice, if you are like me and enjoy the fish but don't want the rice. There were also a variety of rolls. One of the nice things here is that they have low sodium soy sauce available - sure, lots of salt in oriental cooking anyway, but the low sodium soy sauce tastes exactly like the full salt kind and is a little better for you.

There is an extensive salad bar that not only has regular salad fixings and plenty of them but also has a whole side of Asian prepared salads. On one end were cold shrimp and raw clams and oysters on the half shell. The oysters were good. So was the shrimp. (I tend to skip the clams though I do eat them occasionally.)

There is a large dessert bar that includes a number of Asian desserts in addition to the little cream puffs and pastries. There is soft serve ice cream and sundae toppings.

What stands out about this holiday meal is that there is so much and so much that is different that you WANT to try, that you can't possibly try it all. I went past what I knew was my limit at this meal because I kept seeing more things to try- and most of you who read this site know that when I try things I take just a little - not a whole portion. But I was overfull with the many little portions that I tried - and I could have kept going if my stomach and my better sense were not telling me to stop. This is what I like about the holiday dinner at Best Buffet and this is what brought me back from last year - and likely next year as well.

According to their website, this meal seems to be going to be repeated (though they do not give menu details) for Chinese New Year on January 21, 22, and 23, 2012 (the year of the dragon). Make reservations if you are interested in going for Chinese New Year. (The Christmas buffets need no reservations.)

So, Best Buffet - if you are reading this - get the food hot and keep it that way - and keep offering this wonderful holiday feast for Christmas and New Year's.

I do recommend this special dinner. I cannot speak for the day to day regular meals, as it has been awhile since I have been to one here. I can tell you that weeknight prices are almost $20 a person and weekends are $27! They seem to have a lunch special going on now that the website says will end at the end of February where lunch is $8.99 (regularly $10.99). It is this lunch special that brought all of the positive comments that I mentioned at the beginning. Yes, it is a bargain at $8.99 to get close to what you get at night for twice that price - but for me and I am sure many who live on a budget, $8.99 is still a lot to spend for lunch- though I would not expect a buffet like this to charge any less - even at $10.99. I am sure that there are many who can afford it - and the time on a weekday to have a lavish lunch.

Peking Restaurant - Revisited, Williamsburg, Virginia

I wish that I was saving the best for the last of the restaurants that I recently dined at during my trip to Williamsburg, Virginia, but my trip to the Peking Restaurant - the Asian Buffet that this site named as the best in 2007 - was a bit disappointing. I have been there since that article was written, but there have been some changes - and sometimes change is not good.

Let me tell you a little about this buffet in general. It is located in a shopping center next to a K-Mart on one of the main routes in Williamsburg, Virginia. It is well known by the locals and we have had many dinners there sitting near employees from both Colonial Williamsburg and Busch Gardens. This has been for a long time, a must stop and dine for us - and often we will have more than one meal there during our trip. We planned the same for this recent trip and we went there the first night that we arrived in town.

From the outside all looked the same. I had read before we went that they have added a "sushi train" and also a Thai food section to the buffet. I have not really had Thai food before other than a dish or two included at Asian buffets so this would be something different to try. I wondered how a buffet would incorporate a "sushi train" but I will talk more about that as we go along here. We went inside. The room to the right of the entrance which was once a gift shop is now an additional dining room. The rest of the dining room was pretty much as it had been. The large flat screen TVs were still around the room at the ceiling playing Oriental videos, though there seemed to be less of them. They are not loud and interesting to glance up at during the meal for what they are playing. What I did notice was that the layout of the buffet was different. The serving stations were changed to now line two walls (one of those walls, the divider to the dining room). The large round Mongolian grill was still where it had always been. There has always been another grill area at the opposite end of the buffet and that was there as well, but the sushi bar that had once been at the end of that was now a dessert station and the "sushi train" was now taking up a section that had once been table space (apparently why they needed the dining space now where the gift shop had once been).

The price for the meal is still good. With the tax and the tip, the dinner came to $17 per person including unlimited soft drinks which is not bad for a large Asian buffet meal. Again, remember this is with tax and tip. This is more than the $10.99 that it was five years ago - but not much and think how much everything else has gone up in price in five years!

There is a large section of soups - several different soups beyond the usual wonton, egg drop, hot and sour selection. Clam Chowder, Vegetable Chicken, Seaweed, and Miso soup were there among the usual. There is also a noodle soup station in the middle of the grill area on the left side of the restaurant. Here you can get one of the several types of noodles cooked with broth and vegetables to order. We love Vietnamese Pho and they will make that for you here. While the pho broth is not seasoned as it would be in a Vietnamese restaurant, this soup is good here. We both enjoyed a bowl of that.

Let me now tell you about the "sushi train". This is something that is popular in Tokyo and has come to some Japanese restaurants in the United States. The idea in one of those other restaurants is that you sit at a long counter and a moving line of sushi dishes travel past you. There you take what you like and you are charged per plate at the end. HERE - there is a section on the side rear of the restaurant that has a U-shaped, tall counter covered with plexiglass that has doors every so many feet. Inside there is a track upon which single pieces of sushi travel along on plates. There was all types of sushi - far beyond what Peking Restaurant had in the past. Many were spicy. Each plate has one piece of sushi on it. Now, here is the problem. This is a buffet. How many small plates are you going to pick up and take back to your table? You are not eating here at the counter as is done at a "sushi train" restaurant. So you take a couple - maybe three -and you go back and you are up again a few minutes later for more. Some were taking larger plates and emptying the smaller plates into the larger plate - but this area is not set up for this and there is no place to put these empty little plates. You also need a hand free to open the door to reach inside the moving conveyor belt to take a plate. Knowing what each plate had on it was also a problem. There was some attempt to place a name on a crystal block in front of the plates of each type of sushi as it went along - but some of these were obviously not correct, and if you missed the name as it moved past, you were guessing what was on each plate. There was also some attempt at color coding each plate color for the type of sushi that was on it - roll, spicy, fish, raw, vegetable - but the chart got complex - fast! This was a good idea but not for a buffet. I wound up taking things that looked like what they were not. I love sushi - I moved on from this quickly. It was not worth the effort that it took - and it was almost impossible to go back and find the same thing (even basic things) that I had taken and wanted again. Put this in a buffet situation where you sit down at this moving line of sushi and it would be something special. Here it was a gimmick gone wrong.

The Thai dishes were laid out along a counter all together. There was Thai Dumplings, Pad Thai, Sweet Coconut Rice Cakes, Fish Cake, Sticky Rice with Tropical fruit, Green Curry Shrimp, Thin Rice Roll, and Thai Fried Rice. Things were labeled that they were spicy - and they absolutely were. I tried what appeared to be the milder of what was there and it was beyond what I enjoy in spicy/hot dishes. If you are a Thai food eater, this all may be great. To the uninitiated, this was not for the beginner.

On the grill there is terriaki beef and terriaki chicken. There were also dumplings here. There used to be hibachi beef and chicken here right off the grill, but that is gone, much to my wife's disappointment.

The assortment of hot dishes also seems to have changed and there seemed to be less of them and what was there was more on the spicy and sweet side of Chinese dishes than a broad assortment. In the past there had been more of the simpler and less common on a buffet Chinese dishes, as simple as chow mein or moo shu. Those were not there as they once had been. There is a large variety of rice with three types of fried rice and also brown rice.

The Mongolian barbecue is there to make up for what may be missing on the rest of the buffet. Here you can make what you like by taking raw meat (chicken, beef, pork, shrimp) and mixing it with raw vegetables, adding a sauce on top and having the chef cook it for you while you watch. This was as it had been. You make what you like and season it to taste. Here you can be as simple or as complex as you want. Choose only vegetables, if you like, or choose only meat. It is all up to you.

Desserts are now more of the typical Chinese buffet fare - little pieces of pastry/cake, fruit, pudding, and soft serve ice cream. Nothing really to talk about.

Service is still good. Dishes were picked up right away, soft drinks were refilled, and the staff is friendly.

We had more than enough to eat. There was no question that there was not a variety nor was it hard to find something that you would like. It was not the same though. If walking in here for the first time ever, it would not strike me that this would rank as a "best" and that is how I have always felt about this restaurant in the past.

After the meal was another story, and something(s?) that I chose to eat did not sit well. This happens rarely to me at a buffet. Perhaps it was the small taste of one of the Thai dishes that I tried or the spicy sushi. But it was something, and I did not enjoy how I felt and what happened later that evening. My wife was fine, however, but she does not eat the unusual. She picks the simple and the things that she knows. After this, I had decided that we would go back to Peking Restaurant another night and see what happens. However, with the choice of the other nice, new buffets that I have written about in the past several weeks that we could go to, and the memory of how I felt after this meal, we did not go back. There will be another trip and I am sure that we will try Peking Restaurant again - but I know that I will be cautious in what I select. And you know what? At a buffet like this you should not have to feel that you need to be cautious.

So, my conclusions about Peking Restaurant? Frankly, it will be wait and see the next time. Two months ago I would tell you that you MUST go here for a wonderful meal. Now, I will tell you that it has been great in the past. Maybe I will say that again in the future - I just did not have a good experience this night - after the meal. Others who live close by tell me it is still great. Maybe I picked up the wrong thing to put in my mouth. I don't know...

The Peking Restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia is located at 120 Waller Mill Road in the Big Kmart Shopping Center. (Kingsgate Green Shopping Center – Bypass Road (Rt.60)). There is a website and that is listed at this side of the page.

Wasabi Oriental Buffet, Williamsburg, Virginia

Wasabi Oriental Buffet was a pleasant find in Williamsburg, Virginia. Our trip to Williamsburg, Virginia included a buffet meal every night with the idea of bringing our readers some new buffets to visit in their travels. Three of those meals were at Asian buffets. We almost did not eat at this one. In fact, the first night that we went to eat there the parking lot to the right side of the restaurant was full. On a second night's successful attempt, we saw that the parking lot to the left of the restaurant is not just for the motel that is right behind, but there is a large section next to the restaurant that is just for this restaurant. I am glad that we saw this because we had a very pleasant meal.

The Wasabi buffet advertises itself as having a Mongolian Grill (in this area all of the Asian buffets include a Mongolian Grill), having Hawaiian BBQ, and having a sushi bar. I was very curious to discover what Hawaiian BBQ was. When we entered what we found was the usual Asian buffet setup with hot and cold buffet servers and a section behind a counter with a grill and sushi bar. We were pleasantly greeted and brought to our table which was in one of the two dining rooms that this restaurant has. One dining room is just off the buffet area and is very traditionally decorated. There is another dining room through an alcove that is much larger and is much more modernly decorated. Each room has a distinct look - both very nice. The other dining room is used for catering as well as an additional dining room and they have had weddings and parties in this room.

We paid just $29 and change for the two of us for dinner on a weeknight and this included the price of the meal, unlimited soft drinks, the tax, and the tip. Compared to prices at home at a comparable Asian buffet this is very good.

We started with soup, as always. There was the usual assortment of wonton, egg drop, and hot and sour. Lately, I have been mixing egg drop with hot and sour to tone down the hot in the hot and sour. It is an unusual combination but I like hot and sour and don't like it spicy, so while this may not tell you how the hot and sour soup is on its own, the combination was good. My wife had the wonton soup and liked it.

There is a small salad area and as is typical of Asian buffets it is really just an afterthought. Few go to this type of buffet to make a salad, but if you are inclined, the lettuce, the dressings, and the toppings were there for you to do so. There was cold, peel and eat shrimp at the salad bar. Clams and mussels were also on ice.

There was a large sushi bar and there was a broad variety of sushi rolls - but it was all rolls. There was no plain fish or just fish on a bed of rice. If you enjoy, sushi rolls you will be very satisfied with what you find. If you like the fish and don't want the rice, then you will be picking it out of the rolls.

There are hot crab legs but they do cost $5 extra with the buffet. If you take crab legs, you will be charged the additional $5.00. Again, this is not unusual in Asian buffets that I have been to in the South. Frankly, I prefer it this way. If you are not going to eat the crab legs why should you pay for extra that is added to the buffet price. This way the crab legs are there for you and given the price of the buffet meal, an extra $5 for the crab legs is not unreasonable.

Hot dishes abound on this buffet along with a nice variety of appetizers. On the hot buffet, there were three types of dumplings - fried pork dumplings, steamed shrimp dumplings and peach buns - a doughy, steamed dumpling that looks like a peach filled with sweet bean paste. Entrees included General Tso's chicken, baby clams in a red sauce, spicy chicken, beef with broccoli, egg foo young, crab and cheese casserole, scallops, teryaki chicken, salmon, sauteed green beans, shrimp and seafood legs combination, bourbon chicken, ribs, boneless ribs, sweet and sour chicken, mussels with cheese, lo mein, and others. There were egg rolls, fried cheese filled wontons, "sea" balls, fried shrimp, and sesame bread. The buffet also had a lot of side dishes - consider some "international" - and these included fried rice, mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows, fries, cabbage, broccoli, red potatoes, rice noodles, corn, and garlic spinach. Dishes may change by the night as there are other dishes shown on their website that I did not see the night that we were there.

Now, what about the Hawaiian BBQ? On the hot buffet there was a tray with a Hawaiian BBQ chicken and Hawaiian BBQ pork. Both were the meat in a slightly sweet sauce. Not bad, but not what I imagined as Hawaiian BBQ - perhaps I was thinking roast suckling pig...

The Mongolian BBQ was the usual selection of raw beef, pork, chicken, and shrimp available to mix with an assortment of raw strips of vegetables. You place what you want on a plate - add a sauce for it to cook in and hand it to the chef behind the counter who cooks this all for you on a large, very hot, flat griddle. This is always a good addition to an Asian buffet because if you don't see what you like on the buffet you can create it yourself at the grill.

Dessert was the usual Asian buffet assortment - small pieces of cake, fried dough balls in sugar, chocolate pudding, and fresh fruit. This is standard oriental buffet desert fare and one does not go to an Asian buffet for the desserts.

So how was it all. At first, I had my concerns. The first of the hot foods that we took, after the soup, were warm but not hot. They should have been hotter. As the meal progressed and more was put out, however, the temperature of the foods increased to proper temperatures. This was not a concern into the meal. The taste of the food was good. It was an enjoyable meal. There was plenty to choose from and plenty to eat. We certainly were not hungry after the meal and we both said that this was a restaurant that we wanted to come back to again. When we were leaving the Oriental gentleman at the front cashier's desk (perhaps the owner) bowed to us. This was the first time anyone at a buffet bowed to me.

We both were pleased - remember my picky eater wife - she was pleased. I think that you will be too. If you are in Williamsburg, Virginia try Wasabi Oriental Buffet.

Wasabi Oriental Buffet is located at 1203 Richmond Road, Williamsburg, Virginia. This is right near Colonial Williamsburg and William and Mary University. Their phone number is 757-645-3988. There is a website and there is a link to that website at the side of this page.

If you look in the free tourist magazines that are at all of the hotels, you should find a coupon to save money on your meal at Wasabi. This makes it an even better deal!