Over this whole pandemic/economic disruption/recovery period, watching the subtle changes in business—stores, restaurants, prices, formats—has been really interesting to me. Since I really like buffets, I’ve used them as a sort of microcosm of these changes: changes that arise out of economics but which also end up being more than that.

This time, I’m writing about an Indian buffet in a strip mall in Germantown, Maryland, called India Palace. It’s one of only a handful of Indian restaurants in the D.C. metro area that still offers a daily lunch buffet. (Like virtually all Indian restaurants, there’s no dinner buffet and never was to my knowledge.) Incidentally, India Palace also happens to be a few storefronts away from a Japanese restaurant that offers one of the region’s last sushi lunch buffets. So I like this strip mall.

Almost every Indian restaurant everywhere I’m familiar with—New Jersey, where I grew up; New York, where my father worked; Maryland and Virginia, where I’ve lived—has had a lunch buffet (usually with no a la carte) and a full-service, a la carte dinner. This format was as familiar as a Chinese takeout restaurant or a classic pizza parlor. Before the pandemic, it was unusual to find an Indian restaurant that did not offer a lunch buffet.

After the pandemic, however, the vast majority of them in the D.C. area have gotten rid of that. Many of them still offer a buffet on weekend lunches; I assume because the work crowds who filled up the weekday lunch just aren’t there anymore in numbers to make a buffet pencil out. In place of the weekday lunch buffet, there might just be a regular menu. Or lunch specials of some kind. Or a thali, possibly with unlimited refills. Recently an all-you-can-eat thali-only Indian restaurant opened in western Fairfax County: the first of its kind in the region.

It’s interesting how that single dominant “Indian restaurant” blueprint or format has now branched out into a variety of formats, driven by inflation, changes in office occupancy, and evolving American tastes and creativity or originality among Indian restaurateurs.

It looks a lot like biological evolution after an extinction-level event—how you see all this dynamism, all these branches that go their own way and create new diversity, different ways of navigating this new world.

But the food. This particular restaurant charges about $19 for its lunch buffet, which is the low end of the range these days. An equivalent spread pre-pandemic would have been maybe $12 to $15. The offerings are mostly the usual ones, but they’re done well. All the bases are covered: deep fried appetizers, chicken and goat curries, chana masala (chickpeas), saag (spinach), rice (plain and biryani), chutneys, Indian ice cream (kulfi), mango lassi, chai.

What’s interesting is how this very good but pretty typical restaurant experience is now no longer typical. Five years ago I didn’t even think about any of this; you could go to the buffet the way you bought milk at the supermarket. Now it feels like a discovery, a holdout.

You don’t have to do anything unusual or rare in itself to stand out; you just have to keep doing it when everyone else has stopped.

Related Reading:

Buffet Chronicles: Disappearing Sushi

Buffet Chronicles: More Interesting In Theory

Buffet Chronicles: Back to the Beginning

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