I wrote recently about Chinese buffets—not buffets serving Chinese food (though they did) but buffets in China. Specifically, the hotel buffets. At least for breakfast, they were typically included in the room rate. And they were really good. Good as hotel food goes, but even good as a lot of restaurant food goes. A couple of them even had guys cutting or pulling fresh noodles to order off blocks of dough!

One buffet at a hotel was especially noteworthy, but it’s a public restaurant in a large hotel, and we went for dinner, and the building is really cool too. So I saved that one for its own piece.

Here’s the building:

It is called, fittingly, the Castle Hotel, and it’s part of Marriott’s high-end Luxury Collection, basically unique hotels under the Marriott brand. (My wife remembers back when, before the hotel was opened, an earlier form of this building (the same structure but fairly heavily altered) was apartments and was home to the city’s seashell museum, which is now located elsewhere.)

From an article:

Originally built in 2002, the palatial Bavarian-style castle is in the final stages of a complete interior renovation by the Dalian Yifang Group. When it opens this summer, The Castle Hotel will be one of the few luxury hotels in Asia to be housed inside a castle, featuring 292 luxurious guest rooms and suites and 67 apartments – most of which offer stunning ocean views – along with a sophisticated collection of restaurants and lounges, including an authentic German beer café with home-brewed specialties.

The Castle Hotel is situated above Dalian on Lotus Mountain, surrounded by lush foliage, overlooking Xinghai Square as well as Xinghai Bay and the Yellow Sea. The Castle Hotel is also the starting point for the romantic Binhai Road, the coastal route that winds along China’s northern coast for 32 kilometers. For visitors new to the city, Dalian offers a unique blend of European, Russian, Japanese and traditional Chinese architecture reflecting the city’s fascinating history when its ports were used as an international trading hub during ancient times.

But we were here for the buffet. Like every buffet, there were some really good items, some mediocre ones, and a lot of just-fine ones. Mediocre entry: the…tacos:

But there was enough really good food to easily get a full meal, and the variety was so much fun. Not just food—a whole dessert section with a real bakery:

A self-serve wine bar and beer taps! It’s a good thing we walked and took a cab back.

About half the desserts/pastries were very good and the other half were alright, but they were all fun. I rarely drink coffee in the evening, but the cappuccino with these pastries was nice.

There was a nice sashimi and sushi section (the sushi is off to the right of the frame here). The second one from the left here is the “strip” part of a giant clam, raw. Like a cross between a surf clam sushi piece and a clam on the half shell.

And much more! Grilled seafood and oysters, soups, freshly boiled dumplings, skewered meat, scallops, Peking duck, grilled calamari on a stick.

A visitor came by, too:

It was a delightful dinner. I like places where there’s a little bit of a plucky boosterism, a sense of climbing but not quite at the top. I got that sense—along with other senses—in China. I got it when we visited Croatia. And when I visited Cincinnati.

That’s the germ of a broader point. But the food and setting were enough to write about all on their own.

Related Reading:

The Last Buffet, Or The First New One?

March Of The Minivans

Drink And (Let Him) Drive

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