Great Buffet

***UPDATE*** We passed by this restaurant on October 4, 2009 and it was now an Indian and Pakistani restaurant. Too bad, I actually liked this buffet place and may have go back again.
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I've been planning for this buffet for quite a while. Haven't been to any buffet recently, I was actually craving for one. But then it comes to the day, and I didn't know where to go. Talking about options. It seems that all the reviews for buffets on yelp haven't been good. And I also found out that the Todai in Cupertino has already been shut down. So sad. It was actually quite a decent place for sushi buffet.

I decided to give Great Buffet a try. It was supposedly owned by an Indonesian. Not that it matters that much but I thought I should give it a try and give them a bit business. Hubby was a bit worry, but I told him, if upon looking into the restaurant there were no people, then we should leave. A lot of the reviews talked about stale food. I can see that happened only on days when they were not busy. But weekends shouldn't be one of those days. But again, you never know.

Parking lot was quite decently filled. Still lots of space available at the back of the restaurant. When we approached the restaurant, there was a sign that said Father's Day $15.99 all day. I totally forgot about Father's Day, and I worried that the restaurant may be packed. But upon entering there wasn't any line. It wasn't completely empty, but it had quite an amount of patrons. There were some more private area on the left hand side of the door that was occupied by a huge group. Later on they were playing music and showing off slides/video through an overhead projector.

There was a sign by the entrance that showed price for weekend lunch to be $12.99. So I confirmed that with the waitress and she said that Father's Day had special price . When I asked whether the menu was different from the regular weekend lunch, she said it's different. Hmm...

The first thing I went to check was the sushi table. Not too many selections and we were kinda guessing as to what's on display because there were no label on them. I like the rolls because they were smaller than usual but they fit right in my mouth so it wasn't messy. But they didn't taste fresh and were kinda dry.

There were quite a lot selections of food. Dimsum - siumay, pao, steam lotus cake. Seafood - oyster with green onion and sesame oil, steam giant snow crab leg, deep fried salt and pepper prawn, steam fish fillet. Usual fares - beef broccoli (which I actually enjoyed), sweet and sour prawn, chow mein, fried rice, fried dumplings. Soups - fish ball soup, hot and sour soup (good and not MSG loaded), egg drop soup.

One thing that we liked about this buffet was the freshly grilled meat. They provided marinated beef, chicken, squid and mackerel fillet. Pick your selection and bring it to the grilling man and he'd do the rest for you. Yes, it took about 15 minutes, depending on the traffic. What we did was dropped of the plate at the counter and went to our table to enjoy the other cooked selection. Went back to the grilling counter later on to pick up our plate. You do have to know yourselves which one was yours because there's no number provided. Mine was pretty easy because we loved squid so ours was mostly squid.


Hubby especially loved the ice cream selection too. At other buffet mostly they provided vanilla ice cream on cones. But this one had an array of at least six different flavor ice cream. I loved the orange and coffee ones. Grab a bowl and try a few selection to know which one you like !

Great Buffet
20030 Stevens Creek Blvd, Cupertino, CA 95014 * (408)255-2828

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