Eating at buffets is a game, and it’s a game I usually lose, though willingly.
When the offer is all-you-can-eat for a set price, the glutton within me reads that as a challenge. By the third trip to the buffet line, a voice from behind my belly wonders: “Have we truly had all we can eat? Have we really?” Then from somewhere inside my head comes the counterpoint: “We don’t need all this. We’re fat enough. Please just eat a normal meal and leave.”
No surprise that the stomach generally prevails, aided by the nose smelling the food and the eyes seeing the feast and a traitor somewhere in the brain as well, calculating the improving price-to-plate ratio with each trip back to the buffet’s breach.
Turns out I’m particularly susceptible to Asian buffets, with their vast variety of food I would never attempt to prepare at home and their illusion of healthful eating with all those cooked vegetables and rice dishes. Among these Asian buffets, the most irresistible for my senses is Kanpai, a Japanese buffet of sushi and side dishes in Mid-City. The idea of all-you-can-eat sushi is off-putting for some people, and reasonably so. For my part, I came of age understanding that sushi was a subtle and precise cuisine, crafted with artfulness by a chef with disciplined training and offered like a treasure to a sophisticated clientele. But welcome to America, where the great democratizing wheel of choice, abundance and entitlement can make even regal red maguro a comfort food for contractors who compete with their buddies on volume consumed.
Of course, Kanpai’s buffet does not set out the world’s greatest sushi, but it’s not bad either. I’ve never had any sushi here that didn’t taste fresh, but the fish is just not the most succulent available nor are the portions very generous in relation to the amount of rice in each piece.
Which brings up one of Kanpai’s business strategies—eat what you want, but take what you eat. Customers are prohibiting from just eating the fish and discarding the mound of rice and management makes a point of enforcing the rule.
Kanpai is also a place to ease a neophyte into the joy of sushi. None of it will seem too exotic. The snowcrab roll, for instance, is imitation crabmeat, mayo and rice rolled together—familiar Louisiana fare indeed. In fact, most of the sushi they serve is not raw at all.
I keep coming back to Kanpai for the bounty of it. Even if you don’t like sushi, you can assemble several plates loaded up from the hot and cold buffet stations without getting the same thing twice. Pork dumplings, noodle salads, tempura vegetables, steamed spinach, cucumber and seaweed salad, fried fish, egg rolls and Chinese-American standards abound and are all at least passably good, some very good (especially the cold salads).
Lunch is the real bargain at Kanpai, with a standard rate of $9.50 for the buffet plus whatever you drink (there’s a full bar). At dinner, the sushi selection greatly improves with more fish choices and more elaborate rolls, including usually a rainbow roll and softshell crab roll. The dinner rate rises to $14.50, still a great deal for a belly full of fish and wasabi.
Downtown, one Asian restaurant has turned to the lunch buffet to introduce harried office workers to the locally rare joys of Korean cuisine. Genghis Khan is a moderate fine dining restaurant during the evening, with the very striking feature of a musical cast for a wait staff and a violin virtuoso as host, owner and kimchee impresario, Henry Lee. The place is a classical music institution that recently moved to the CBD after 26 years on a particularly gritty stretch of Tulane Avenue. This smart move gave the restaurant a much greater audience of business people and tourists for its lunch buffet. During lunch, the white table clothes and the pleasingly heavy silverware are still out, but the music is usually taped.
The lunch buffet is not cheap—$11 a head—but the quality of preparation and presentation far exceeds the norm for buffets. The Korean fare also is refreshingly different from the standard Chinese-American drill but also familiar enough that it doesn’t require a primer to enjoy. There are steamed string beans and egg rolls, tempura vegetables and egg drop soup, but also a spicy chicken Genghis Kahn with mushrooms, a chopped cabbage salad with slippery glass noodles, sliced Mongolian beef in a rich gravy and an addictive, simple side dish of cucumbers in a bath of vinegar and red chiles. The best dishes are all shot through with this warming red chile and they lay out a variety of other salty, hot or sweet sauces by the buffet.
One Asian buffet that skewers all of my price calculations is Chinatown, which is located on Canal Street beneath that curious, glowing red “Chinatown” sign you sometimes notice next to the Ritz-Carlton hotel. Here, they serve a sprawling pan-Asian buffet with over 42 choices from which you can load up flimsy plastic plates to your heart’s content. Then, at the cash register, they put your plate on a deli scale and charge you by the pound, $3.25 to be precise.
The pricing policy encourages restraint—mound your plate as high as possible and you’ll pay more at the register. Try a spoonful of a dozen dishes—as I like to do—and you can get out for less than the price of a McDonalds Happy Meal across the street.
There’s also room for gamesmanship here. Avoid the Chinese spareribs, which are tough anyway, because the bones make up most of the weight. But do pile on the baked salmon, which is oily but still one of the best things going here. You could conceivably load up on nothing but salmon, cooked with onions and lemon, for $3.25 a pound (grocery stores usually get about $5 a pound for filets).
Weight considerations aside, the food quality varies widely. The basic Gen. Tso’s chicken here should be demoted immediately and renamed Sgt. Tso’s Breading. The ham sandwiches cut into triangles look really strange in an Asian buffet and the depressing sushi was oddly displayed amid plates of Jello and desserts. But other choices are surprisingly good, like the shu mai dumplings bursting with ground pork and the shrimp fried rice with impressively large and numerous shrimp. Soups, including a good and spicy hot and sour soup, go for $1 a cup. This kind of pricing makes Chinatown a bargain place to stop in for a quick snack (a cup of soup and two dumplings set me back $1.80). So choose, but choose carefully.
REVIEWED THIS MONTH
Chinatown: 1005 Canal St., 525-8610.
Genghis Khan: 201 Baronne St., 299-9009.
Kanpai: 4116 Canal St., 482-0880.
