In College Park, Maryland, along U.S. Route 1, there is this old Chinese buffet.

The back view:

From the road, you’re drawn in by this old sign advertising what is, these days, a pretty cheap lunch:

And as you enter, you’re greeted by these solid, imposing wooden doors, and this aging wooden 1940s building up close.

Inside, the layout is a little confusing, suggesting, as you might guess from the exterior, that this is a building which has housed a lot of uses, and seen a lot of modifications, over the years.

That somewhat dim interior, those faux-brick tiles that every small Chinese buffet had, the smell of Chinese takeout classics, the faded murals of cranes, the Great Wall, and…Dutch windmills and tulips?—this place is worn out, and it could use a deep cleaning, but it brings back memories.

I ate here only a couple of times when I lived in College Park, usually favoring a larger, more modern buffet about 15 minutes away to satisfy my all-you-can-eat cravings. That place had a make-your-own-hibachi bar, a decent sushi selection, and more dishes overall.

But I always liked this place, a real throwback to what the first major generation of Chinese buffets in the 1980s and early 1990s were like. And still are, in the increasingly few instances where they still exist.

What does a plate here look like? Pure, classic, decent, greasy, inexpensive Americanized Chinese food. Nothing was amazing. Nothing was terrible. The wings and the beef with scallions and onions were pretty good. And the soft-serve machine, swapped out in most modern buffets for a freezer full of ice cream cups and bars, actually serves up creamy, properly frozen vanilla.

Beautiful.

This place is not part of a chain, but it might as well be. It’s one of those everyday, standard restaurants which follows a “type,” such that all of them together almost constitute an informal, diffuse chain. If I say “pizza parlor” or “Chinese takeout” or “Thai restaurant” or “Mexican restaurant,” you immediately know the menu, the seating, the counter, the décor—pretty much everything about the place. And yet, these places are serving up food that’s probably closer to from-scratch than a lot of more expensive chains.

It’s also curious how these “types,” or concepts, or formats, come and go. The soft-serve machine, for example, or the bright red boneless pork sparerib dish, are things you very rarely see in a buffet which opened in the last few years. It’s probably part of whatever “standard Chinese buffet package” was circulating at the time that China Buffet opened, and it has simply never stopped serving that menu.

But a place opening today would adopt a different “standard Chinese buffet package.” Inconsequential a thing as it is, something almost like historic preservation applies here, and I’m happy to see this place keep on trucking, keeping something in circulation that is now out of style, and which may, with the exception of these stragglers, never appear commercially again.

Now, in my subhead, I wrote, “A classic Chinese buffet that I feel like I’ve seen before.” There is another similar China Buffet that I’ll be writing about for a coming “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” entry—not the food, but the very curious building it occupies.

Stay tuned!

Related Reading:

NIMBYism and Existence Value

Buffet Chronicles: Disappearing Sushi

Buffet Chronicles: More Interesting In Theory

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