In my last night in Beijing I was nursing a sore throat and headache, so I wasn’t up to having more of the usual oily and spicy fare. To my relief, the tour was taking us to a buffet place, so I thought at least I can just pick something soft and plain to eat. So we arrived at ‘The Golden Jaguar’, the largest buffet restaurant in Beijing.
One look at the place and I realised I was silly for thinking I’ll just have some congee. This place was no foodstar. It was, quite literally, the largest buffet I’ve ever seen in my life. There were 700 different food selections, the restaurant seats up to 1000 people, and it took me 10 minutes of walking around each time I went up to get some food. The selection was so huge the place was laid out like a street of food stalls of different cuisines around the world. The cuisines included: French, Thai, Taiwanese, Korean, Japanese, Indian, Mexican, and Chinese. You could even order the delicacies from each cuisine, such as escargot for the French, the hot pot beef ramen from the Taiwanese, grilled eel from the Japanese and even steamed fish, abalone and shark fin soup from the Chinese stall, all included in the buffet. For the drinks, beer was included as well as 8 different types of freshly squeezed juices and about 16 different types of tea – and they are actual tea leaves, including western herbal teas like lavender and rose tea, not the lipton teabags.
Now for the food quality – after getting over the initial amazement of the huge selection, I was somewhat let down by the mediocre quality of the actual food. It would appear that Golden Jaguar has fallen into a common trap for buffets – focusing all on quantity, and not as much on quality. The escargot and French onion soup were not bad and the Japanese tempuras were crispy with fresh prawns, and the Taiwanese hot pot ramen was tasty and quite authentic. However, the grilled fishes were dry, the Cantonese dishes were all of food court quality, and I prefer not to think about the huge amount of MSG and corn flour poured into the Shark Fin soup. The freshly squeeze juices were great (you can’t really ruin fruit juice) and just what the doc ordered for my sore throat, but desserts – both Asian and Western styled – looked better than they tasted. I suppose I can’t possibly expect authentic crème brulee from a buffet place in China but I thought the chinese sweet dumplings (lor mai chee) and egg custards could’ve been better. The only decent desserts I had amongst the ones I tried (admittedly I couldn’t try them all, just like the mains) were the coconut jelly and mango pudding — the type of food you can’t really stuff up.
But all in all, for a buffet meal in a decent restaurant that costed only about $35 AUD, I was probably being too demanding. They even had a band with a cute chick singing. Definitely worth visiting at least once, if only for the experience.