The year is 1995. My family, the Khans, formerly of Dhaka, Bangladesh, now of Dallas, Texas, are finally beginning to settle in our adopted homeland. After a few rocky years in the States, my parents have steady-ish jobs, an apartment where the lights come on, and a neurotic 8-year-old (me) who no longer weeps in school every day, my angst already threatening to bloom at a tender young age. When the mood strikes, when there’s joie de vivre in our hearts, we even go out to eat. The restaurant? It’s always, always a Chinese buffet.
And it’s always on a Saturday morning when my family makes the pilgrimage to our favorite all-you-can-eat establishment tucked into a strip mall off of Northwest Highway. We follow a certain set of rituals: The night before, my dad imposes a half-joking, half-serious fast, encouraging light portions. He has a banana for dinner; my mom rolls her eyes but acquiesces. If we arrive at exactly 11 a.m., right when the restaurant opens, we’re greeted by rows and rows of fresh, heaping platters of all the American Chinese classics: mounds of fiery red General Tso’s chicken, piles of slick lo mein, deep vats of beef-and-broccoli, and some sort of crab-and-cheese casserole. We walk past stately plastic bamboo plants and regal dioramas of waterfalls and pagodas. Inexplicably, we also see trays of pizza and french fries and chicken wings, although they look a little too much like freezer food to be all that appetizing.
For the indecently low price of $4.95 a person, we heap grotesque piles on our plates, the garlic sauce from the chicken oozing onto the sweet and sour eggplant spilling into the noodles, the whole construction haphazardly sprinkled with fried wontons and spring rolls. At the Chinese buffet, I am a child sovereign with total freedom to do with my dominion as I wish. Occasionally, my dad cries out, “That’s enough! Enough!” when I wield the serving spoon too indiscriminately. This rings hollow because, of course, he will finish what I cannot. My favorite part is the maniacal power I feel while operating the soft-serve machine, swirling crooked lines of chocolate and vanilla ice cream into a crystal bowl.
My family loved Chinese buffets so much that, as we grew more comfortable living in the U.S. and started taking road trips, we ate at buffets in every state we happened to be driving through at lunchtime, in Oklahoma and Arkansas, in Illinois and Maryland, in Utah. (At 15 years old, I had to draw the line when, on our first European vacation, my parents attempted to drag me to a Chinese buffet in Paris.) Today, however, the heyday of the Chinese buffet seems to be long past. While some still exist throughout the country, all the ones we used to go to in my hometown—the China Gardens, the Super Buffets, the King Woks—have closed. I’m deeply nostalgic for that feeling of waking up on a Saturday morning knowing I would spend the next few hours gorging myself at the Chinese buffet.
I’m not the only avid buffet enthusiast. David R. Chan, an archivist of Chinese dining who lives in Los Angeles and has eaten at nearly 8,000 restaurants over the past several decades, said although some might sneer at the quality of the food, he’s always been a sucker for a good Chinese buffet. He first visited one in the late 1970s, when a buffet chain called the Viking’s Table began offering Chinese cuisine at one of its branches. Over the years, he’s patronized them all over the West Coast for delicious, satisfying meals at bargain prices. “I love a deal, so that’s part of the attraction,” he said in an email. “So is the fact of being able to find a dish that you really like and eat to your heart’s content.” But many of Chan’s favorite buffets have since closed too.
For such a beloved institution, Chinese buffets seem to be a fairly recent phenomenon. In 1949, Chang’s Restaurant advertised itself in The Los Angeles Evening Citizen News as a Chinese buffet, claiming to be the “first served in the U.S.” with “over 20 delicious selections.” Chan said Chinese buffets likely drew inspiration from the Scandinavian smorgasbord-style restaurants that started popping up in Las Vegas casinos after World War II and spreading across the country as word of their success grew.
