Super Buffet claims it’s one of the top 100 Chinese restaurants in

Published 7:00 am Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Super Buffet claims it’s one of the top 100 Chinese restaurants in the USA. Not quite.There’s nothing quite like a shitty Chinese buffet. Shitty Chinese food is so delicious, so indescribably tasty, that is practically inspires bouts of synesthesia. Smells get texture. Colors gain smells. Tastes become colorful. The food in a shitty Chinese buffet tastes really brown. And the food at Super Buffet is nothing if not brown. It’s as brown as a fucking UPS truck. Never a frown with golden brown.Super Buffet is located across the street from Northgate Mall; it’s tucked into the same shopping center as Target, and believe me when I say I’d much rather eat at Super motherfucking Buffet than stand in line behind a fat kid ordering the nachos AND a hot dog AND a pretzel AND some popcorn AND ice cream in the fucking Target snack bar. True story: I waited in line behind that kid. He stymied me!Anyway, the food at Super Buffet is almost criminally cheap. The weekday lunch buffet is only $8.95, and there are at least 88 items or so on that goddamned buffet! There’s plenty of seafood. Whole squids were served baked and sliced, their phallic tubes doused in a very suggestive creamy yellow sauce. Baked oysters looked okay, but there’s something about room temperature oysters that makes me not want to participate. Baked shrimp were good if a bit bland, and somehow packed into the baking sheet so tightly, spooning tail-to-tail in melted butter, that they stuck together like dogs fucking.Vegetable chow mein was okay, the supple noodles stained golden with soy sauce, with plenty of sauteed onions. Potstickers, filled with the classic mixture of pork, scallion, and ginger were fried to a crunchy brown and were too disheveled to be anything other than handmade. Green beans were lightly steamed, with a vague hint of garlic and just a little salt, a great palette cleanser between the tastebud bombardment delivered by all of that brown fucking food.While very tasty, the “pepper beef” didn’t taste very peppery, unless by “pepper” they mean “bell peppers,” lightly sauteed chunks of which were everywhere in the pepper beef. Interestingly, the pepper beef was placed on the buffet directly adjacent to “Pepper chicken” which, with all of the brilliant green rings of fresh jalapeno, definitely WAS peppery. General Tso’s chicken, sadly, was a lame iteration of my FAVORITE FOOD OF ALL TIME. The chicken was juicy, but the crust was mushy, and the sauce was weak and lacking in the dried Thai bird chilis that typically give the General his punch. Egg drop soup was gummy, slimy, and sulphurous, but that’s what’s killer about it. Vegetable spring rolls were crisp but bland, and pork spare ribs were moist and tender and lacquered a glossy maroon like a trophy wife’s nails. The sushi was surprisingly non-toxic; I thought for sure the shimmery slip of maguro that I grabbed would be gag- inducingly warm, but it was safely chilled and actually not too bad. The worst thing about the sushi was the lack of accoutrements: wasabi and gari reside in gigantic bowls. You must grab portions of these with tongs. And nozoki, the small soy sauce dishes you usually get when you order sushi, are nowhere to be seen: instead, you’re expected to ladle soy sauce out of a hotel pan into an ice cream bowl, and then dip your sushi into that. There’s cheese pizza, if you want it, and desserts–but fuck that. If you’re still hungry, just get some more spare ribs. They’re sweet enough.Super Buffet claims it’s “One of the 100 Top Chinese Buffets in the USA.” I don’t know if I believe that, but I DO like this place. There’s nothing like a shitty Chinese buffet to kill the pain. I’m talking about the pain of a hangover. Which I had the day I went to Super Buffet. But now I feel better so don’t worry.Rating: 7 hangovers out of 10Super Buffet is located at 300 N.E. Northgate WayThey apparently have TWO TELEPHONES and can be reached at BOTH 206-362-0888 and 206-362-8882