REVIEW: Grand Buffet Restaurant

What: A new Chinese buffet restaurant
Where: 609 N. Main Street, Belmont, NC
How Much: $8.99 per person for dinner (Friday & Saturday); $7.99 the rest of the week.  Lunch is less.

A few weeks ago a new Chinese buffet opened in a former steak house in lil’ ol’ Belmont. The missus and I have been long-time customers of New China right across the street, yet every time we passed Grand Buffet the parking has has been freakin’ packed! I’m sure Lisa got sick of me saying “ya know, we should really check that place out sometime…” every single time we passed the place.

And so it was this past Friday. Lisa was kind of tired after work and didn’t want to cook anything or drive very far to eat out. I couldn’t think of anything in the freezer that I wanted to make for dinner anyway. Charlotte is a long drive from Belmont if you’re tired and just to get something to eat, so I jumped on it with abandon: “CHINESE BUFFET! CHINESE BUFFET CHINESE BUFFET! CHINESE BUFFET! CHINESE BUFFET! CHINESE BUFFET!” Perhaps I was a bit childlike in my tactics. Maybe I should have said something more erudite and well-reasoned instead of simply chanting over and over again. As it was, I needed only to grab a pan and a wooden spoon and start banging on the pan whilst marching in circles chanting “CHINESE BUFFET! CHINESE BUFFET!” to make my regression complete… but hell, it worked and so we went.

We were greeted by the skinniest Chinese man I’ve ever seen – is that a good or bad sign at a restaurant? – and were quickly seated. A waitress quickly came over, took our drink orders and told us that we were free to hit the buffet. But before I get to that, allow me to rag on this restaurant for one thing: they only serve that nasty, Yankee bilge water, Unholy Spawn of Satan, Commie lovin’, carpetbagger cat-piss drink… PEPSI! Bllleeeechhh! I hate being forced to drink Sierra Mist – I could have gotten iced tea – but these days most of these places serve some sort of Nestea-type “non-brewed” tea. It’s one (in my opinion, huge) black mark for what we shall see is an otherwise pretty decent restaurant.

So – on to the food! The buffet offers soups, appetizers, main courses and desserts… but they don’t appear to be laid out in any coherent order. The appetizers – located at the start of the buffet line – includes all your favorites like egg rolls, spring rolls, cheese wonton, chicken wings, BBQ ribs and fried pot stickers, along with some more unusual offerings like “Dim Sum” and “Chicken balls”. The “dim sum” are much like steamed pot stickers, yet the wrappers are left open at the top and the filling is more creamy and piquant than the “glob of pork” you usually get at strip-mall Chinese places. The “chicken balls” (stop snickering – you know that only roosters have balls!) are yummy hushpuppy-like things with chopped chicken and filling inside. Most all of the appetizers hit the mark, except for maybe the egg rolls (very bland and very disappointing) and the cheese wonton, which must have been brushed in a weak sugar solution before being fried, as they had a faint sweet taste that I didn’t like (but that didn’t stop me from eating three of them).

You would expect the soups to be right next to the appetizers, yes? Well, you’d be wrong. They’re clear on the other side of the buffet line. The usual soups – Hot and Sour, Egg Drop, and Won Ton – are offered, but my advice to you is to skip them. The Won Ton soup was bereft of actual wontons (a greedy side effect of buffet-style service?) and the Egg Drop soup looked less than appealing. The Hot and Sour soup – the only one I tried – was beyond mediocre. It wasn’t that it was “bad”. All the right tastes were there, it was just… watered-down tasting. It aspires to one day be good enough to be served at a mall food court Chinese place. It is the very definition of “meh”. This is kind of funny, as New China across the street serves the world’s best Hot and Sour soup! I wonder how Grand Buffet would feel if I brought in my own soup???

So – on to the main courses. Again, many of your favorites are offered here – sweet and sour chicken, Mongolian beef, etc. – along with a surprising amount of seafood. They have a small selection of fresh, beautiful sushi, crab legs and a slew of shrimp dishes, one of which I *must* mention here: “butter shrimp”. It’s shrimp in a buttery sauce that’s just… yummmm!! Oh my gosh, it’s SO GOOD! Also delicious is the “Triple Seafood”, which is composed of squid, shrimp and imitation crabmeat. It sort of sucks that they use the imitation crab meat, but with prices being what they are, can you really blame them? Hell, I’m so excited to actually find a Chinese place around here that serves squid that I’ll forgive them that. The squid was fresh and had just the right texture – not too rubbery. And for the squeamish out there, know that Grand Buffet used de-veined shrimp, which is a big plus over some Chinese places.

The chicken dishes were quite good as well – especially the “Spicy Chicken”, which is chicken in a brown sauce with jalapeno peppers. My favorite dish of the night, however, was the (ironically named) Georgia Chicken.  It’s a cured chicken in a savory sauce. Good, good, good, good!!

For the young ones – or those that don’t like Chinese – Grand Buffet offers a small selection of American treats including pizza, fries and a delicious side-item called “butter potatoes”. They’re thick, wavy potato slices simmered (like their shrimp counterparts) in a delicious butter-based sauce. And to top it all off, there’s even a dessert bar with various flavors of Blue Bunny ice cream (skip the tiny ice cream dishes they offer and use a soup bowl instead) and a slew of tasty pastries.

So – aside from the Pepsi, egg rolls and Hot and Sour soup already mentioned – what’s not to like? Well, I think that on a dish-by-dish basis, New China is a better restaurant. But Grand Buffet offers a lot of things that New China doesn’t and does a few of these unique dishes better than New China – especially the butter shrimp. Plus, the “all you can eat” style makes it easy to get lots what you like whilst skipping that which you don’t. Grand Buffet also offers only fried rice on its buffet line, which is normally a good thing but the fried rice just doesn’t mix with some dishes – like the “Triple Seafood” – as well as plain rice does. That’s a minor quibble though. All in all, Grand Buffet ranks somewhere in the middle of the pack in overall food quality – but the fact that I can (and did) eat three huge plates of it gives it much higher marks than it would get otherwise. Don’t get me wrong – it’s far, far better than food court Chinese. It’s just not as good as New China.

MY RATING: B-