Happiness is not another Chinese buffet
What the world needs now is love, sweet love. What the world does not need, in my opinion, is another low-budget Chinese buffet. I mean, yes, the current economy has added even more importance to those words “all-you-can-eat” — I have a friend on a fixed income who only eats at buffets anymore and weighs two tons — but if I’m going to eat big, there better be at least a half dozen dishes on the buffet that I want to eat — no matter how cheap it is.
At the relatively new Happy Star Chinese Buffet — located in the old Taco Via space at 6743 W. 75th St. — I couldn’t find a hell of a lot that I wanted to pile on my plastic plate. Although the place claims to serve “authentic Chinese food,” the steam tables are filled with the greatest hits of the Chun King repertoire: low mein noodles, fried rice, chewy crab rangoon, egg rolls, and tempura-battered fried chicken puffs accompanied by a sticky red sauce that was neither sweet nor sour nor anything else. It could have been red cooking oil or melted lip gloss, for as bland as it was.
The fat customers in the place didn’t care. They happily loaded up their plates with candied “butter shrimp” and fried pork dumplings and some weird concoction with fake crab or, my favorite (in a tub labeled “fried pineapple”), a whole mess of garlic toast. Other “authentic” Chinese dishes were fried chicken drumettes, fried potato slices, chocolate pudding and Jell-O squares. There was something called “roast chicken” that looked more like embalmed bird and the house special pork didn’t look all that special.
Still, the place is neat and clean and the staff is very nice. The owner watches customers like a hawk. When I paid my bill (the lunch buffet and a plastic tumbler of iced tea set me back about 8 bucks), he looked at me and said: “You didn’t eat very much. People who come here eat much more than you did.”
I wanted to say, “Take off the garlic toast and put some better stuff out on the buffet,” but then I realized, the garlic toast was one of the few things I tasted that I liked!
