2008 Woodie Awards
Oriental Feast 1000 W. 39th St.
Food Review
Ashley Lindemann
Issue date: 2/13/06 Section: Culture
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Take the amount of food you get, multiply it times quality, and divide the whole shebang by cost. Take, for instance, my experience two weeks ago with Thai Place. Medium quantity of food times middling quality equals mediocre. Divided by relatively high cost and you get…not really worth it.
Consider, then, Oriental Feast, one of the many all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets that lay scattered across America's broad landscape like so many peas in a bowl of fried rice. Terrible metaphor aside, this is the sort of restaurant that gives the restaurant formula a run for its money.
Most buffets I've visited in recent years knock their worthiness down a significant notch or two by charging way too much for greasy food I'm sure is pumped full of a secret ingredient (and no kids, it's not love) that causes patrons to bloat up and stop eating after 10 minutes. Not good.
You will not find yourself in this predicament at Oriental Feast. Rather, you may need to pre-set a plate limit - say, three including dessert - before entering lest you overeat as I did and grumble for the rest of the evening that you can't get the image of dancing, tasty crab rangoon out of your mind.
At only $6.99 for all-you-can-eat-goodness on weeknights, the buffet stocked with almost everything imaginable is an amusement park of gourmand bliss that costs only pocket change to enter.
The long, well-stocked buffet sparkles under heat lights at the back of the tidy, roomy dining room. All the usual favorites are present for roll call. In the mix we find beef with broccoli, sweet and sour chicken, General Tso's chicken, mixed vegetables, lo mein, egg rolls, spring rolls, crab rangoon, fried rice and those little doughnut-type balls of scrumptiousness rolled in sugar. Whatever those things are, they might possibly be the No. 1 culprit responsible for the massive popularity Chinese buffets enjoy.
A few extra dishes - tofu country style, shrimp in a variety of incarnations, and lucky bread - lend the buffet a variety not usually found at similar restaurants.
