Robin Garr's LOUISVILLE Restaurant Reviews

78	Asian Buffet 3813 Charlestown Road New Albany, Ind. (812) 945-1888

I used to get excited when another all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet opened, because I'm always in the market for a dining bargain ... as long as the food is good.

But by the time the 20th lookalike buffet came along, the novelty had faded, and it became hard to ignore that most of them didn't merely look alike but acted pretty much the same, serving similar selections of mostly ho-hum Chinese and American fare. If the chef is competent and if management takes care to keep the buffet offerings fresh and hot, a buffet can be a good deal for a quick lunch - or even a family-style seafood dinner on a weekend evening. But it's important to pick and choose.

I'm happy to report that Asian Buffet in New Albany meets this simple standard. This relatively recent arrival, still new enough to sport a big "Grand Opening" banner as of this writing, is just off I-265 a quick jump west from I-65, in a short shopping strip in front of Kohl's.

It looks pretty much the same as its brethren, a large, bright room with the usual Chinese-buffet fixtures: brightly lighted buffet tables, shiny glass and bright chrome, with pink and green indirect lighting overhead to add a touch of color, and on one wall a truly memorable mural-size depiction of the Great Wall outlined in tiny blinking lights. The small entry lobby contains a lighted photo of downtown Hong Kong and a large, somewhat cloudy aquarium that appears to be a home for pets rather than lunch.

Non-smokers are ushered to a more spartan back room that somewhat resembles the dining hall in a Chinese army barracks. Save for an oversize, back-lighted photo of Beijing's Tienanmen Square on one wall, the pastel-gray wallpaper is unadorned with art or decoration; large tables, shiny polyurethane over faux oak, are lined up in regimental rows, with heavy Chinese-restaurant chairs standing at attention along each side.

A standard Chinese-American restaurant menu is available, offering well over 100 items available in the $5 to $10 range, plus daily lunch specials for $4.25. But just about everyone, it seems, hits the six buffet tables that dominate the main dining room. (The Monday-through-Friday lunch buffet is $5.99, and the dinner buffet is $8.95 for adults Monday through Thursday evenings and all day Sunday. It's $9.95 on Friday and Saturday evenings. Youngsters 12 and under eat at a reduced rate, and for those under 4 it's free.

The buffet is a large one, featuring five separate buffet tables - one of them a "double-wide" - plus a standup sushi bar along one side of the room.

Oddly enough, when you parse it out, only one buffet table is devoted to Chinese main courses, plus white rice, startling yellow fried rice studded with canned peas and carrots, and rather greasy looking lo mein noodles. These offerings are the pick of the lunch, though. About a dozen choices were surprisingly good, well-made and carefully attended by hard-working servers who kept the pans stocked with hot, freshly stir-fried delicacies that seemed right up to the quality you would expect if they were prepared to order.

We started in the sushi department, which offered sushi rolls including a couple of cone-shaped "hand rolls." A vegetable roll with crisp green beans at the center was interesting. Cooked-shrimp sushi and a smoked-salmon roll were OK, but carelessly formed and not really the kind of perfectly formed food art that you would expect from a pro sushi chef.

The "double-wide" buffet contains a salad bar with a lot of forgettable non-ethnic items: hard-boiled eggs, canned peaches and jello, along with bland but presentable faux-crab salad, pasta salads and broccoli salad in white, creamy sauces. All-you-can-eat mounds of fresh mussels on the half-shell and peel-and-eat shrimp on ice won our applause, though, and a big plate of real Korean kim chee was a pleasant suprise, earthy and tangy fermented white cabbage infused with fiery dark-red hot pepper sauce.

I called the next buffet table "the Fried Bar," with its astounding array of breaded-and-fried things. Crab Rangoon was good, a fried won-ton flower with sweet cream cheese at its center, tasty and hot though more soft than crisp. An egg roll was a bit soggy, too, although stuffed with good shredded cabbage and carrot and subtle Asian spice. Saving room for more serious stuff, I took a pass on such other deep-fried fare as fried chicken balls, fried eggplant, fried zucchini, fried sweet biscuits, fried cheese-potato bites and fried apple sticks. Bacon-wrapped crab "shapes" made a nice munchy treat, and fried-chicken wings were exceptionally tasty, dusted with a hint of curry before being breaded and crisply fried.

Another table bore mostly American-style entrees, from baked fish to pepperoni pizza, potato skins loaded with cheese, bright yellow macaroni and cheese, even a pan of chocolate pudding. My wife declared the "salmon" (actually baked white fish) bland but passable.

Hot-and-sour soup glistened with cornstarch thickener, but it was a fairly flavorul rendition, thick with egg scrambles, tofu dice and mushrooms, and the flavors were correct, peppery spice and tangy vinegar in balance. Egg-drop soup was up to par, too, simple and fresh shredded chicken and airy egg shreds in rich, salty broth.

Stir-fry dishes that particularly impressed us were chicken with scallions, tender chicken shreds toss-fried with fresh white and green scallions, sizzling hot and aromatic with wok hai flavors of garlic, ginger and hot wok cookery. Pepper steak was also a hit, juicy thin-sliced beef fried with thick onion slices and toothsome squares of mild red and green bell peppers stir-fried just to the point of crisp-tender perfection.

General Tso's chicken was quite good, too, crisply breaded "nuggets" in a spicy reddish-brown sauce; two more thumbs up for chicken with broccoli, featuring tender chicken and perfect broccoli florets, bright green and tender, not mushy. Stir-fried green beans were excellent - simpler than the spicy Szechwan variety but handled as well as all the other vegetables, crisp but not raw, bright green and flavorful.

Stir-fried Chinese dumplings looked a bit limp but taste fine, with a salty soy-based dipping sauce. Honey Chicken consisted of nugget-style boneless bits in a thick and very sweet brown sauce. Boneless spareribs were bright red in color and flavorful but awfully tough.

I was getting full by the time we reached the dessert table at the end of the room, and didn't find most of the offerings particularly enticing - there was a variety of store-bought cookies, something that looked like a sheet cake, and sugared strips of fried won-ton pastry. I tried a small eclair-type pastry, an eggy roll with a shiny white and very sweet marshmallow filling, eerily reminiscent of a Twinkie with a dot of chocolate icing; and a handful of what appeared to be dry-roasted peanuts lightly coated with cane sugar.

Overall, the stir-fry dishes, mussels and shrimp pleased us most; lackluster sushi and soggy fried munchies were less appealing. Still, Asian Buffet stands well above the local median for Chinese buffets, and if you pick and choose, the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet for $6 qualifies as one of the best cheap-eats values in town.

With iced tea and hot tea, two buffets came to just $14.02 including tax, a toll so low that a mere 20 percent tip seemed chintzy, even for a buffet where you truck your own plates to the table; I rounded the tip up to $3.98 for competent and attentive table service that was on the spot with drinks and clearing used plates. $

(February 2003)