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I wasn't laughing when I took my friend Jennifer to lunch and she turned up her adorable Taiwanese-American nose at almost all the dishes on the steam table, returning with only two fried sesame balls on a plate. "You didn't think I'd eat any of that stuff, did you?" she asked. Ha ha ha.
My friend Bob, who loves any kind of buffet, looked cross-eyed at the vats of neon-orange macaroni and cheese dotted with bits of ham, "pizza" covered with a shiny white cheese that looked like latex paint and stuffed wontons that had turned yellow and rubbery. He would have none of it, so we both sauntered over to the Mongolian-barbecue area, where we found slightly defrosted beef, chicken and seafood, assorted vegetables and dozens of oils and seasonings. Bob began shoveling meat, lo mein noodles and different chopped vegetables into a small black plastic bowl and then approached a scowling cook at the round, steaming grill (which we agreed needed a thorough cleaning).
The cook snarled at a willowy young woman in front of us, who had made the egregious error of handing him a china plate piled with her selection of meat and vegetables.
"Next time, use a plastic bowl!" he snapped, snatching the plate out of her hands.
Ha ha ha! As my turn approached, I noticed that the sullen cook glared at customers until they stuffed dollar bills into a clear plastic jug that served as a tip jar. In one sweeping movement, I deftly crammed a dollar into the jar and handed him my little bowl filled with sliced beef, peppers, chopped nuts, chili paste, soba noodles, dried basil and garlic sauce. For a moment, I thought he might have softened, but after a few minutes of absently watching the ingredients sizzle on the grill, he used a wooden stick to spoon it onto a plate and derisively shoved it at me.
The barbecue was the highlight of that dinner. The ingredients I had tossed almost thoughtlessly into the bowl turned out to taste fresh, and the grill seemed to intensify the flavor of the spices.
The same could not, however, be said about anything from the steam tables, with their ethnically helter-skelter assortment of apple cobbler, roasted ham, General Tso's chicken, pork with vegetables ... and pizza. And I had to push aside the skinny crab legs with watery "meat" beneath ironlike armor and gritty meatballs in a sauce that tasted like hot maple syrup. Perhaps I was being too critical, I thought as I looked down at a rumaki of imitation crab meat wrapped in bacon. After all, China One is actually better than a couple of the low-priced casino buffets, and the point of a super buffet is quantity, not quality. Everyone around me seemed perfectly happy.
Or did they? At a table just a few feet away from my booth, I watched a chubby father smack his doughy five-year-old son on the head and scream, "That's not the way you eat pizza in a restaurant! Don't ya have manners?"
I never knew good restaurant manners included hitting small children at the table, but my sense of decorum had already been trounced by that cook at the "barbecue" station.
I confess that once the dinner plates had been cleared, I let my snobbishness slip long enough to skulk off from the dessert table with both a bowl of soft-serve ice cream drizzled with chocolate syrup and a plate artfully arranged with a fluffy chocolate cake roll and stamp-sized squares of moist cake iced with a thick layer of frosting that looked creamy and delicious but tasted vaguely like hand soap. Fine pastries they weren't, but what's better than being able to get as many desserts as you want? Ha ha ha!
