Food Review: All You Can Eat, If You Can Stomach It

Appetizing, amazing, heavenly, and delicious are just some of the words that we have used to describe the food at local restaurants around campus. None of them can be used for the China Wok across the street in the Hudson Valley Plaza, particularly the lunch buffet option.

A buffet sounds good when you have a long day of classes and you are starving, looking for a cheap meal. For just $7.00, you can get the lunch buffet, which includes a free drink and dessert. Sounds great, right?

Here’s the problem with that: you pay the person standing behind the cash register and they hand you two plates, one fork, and that’s it. Your free drink options are a can of grape or orange Crush, a can of Mountain Dew, a can of Pepsi, or water. The mysterious free desserts were nowhere to be found.

Along with the crappy service, the trend continues with the food. I attempted to try all of the options that were presented and only shied away from the roasted mushrooms, sour dough, and egg rolls.

My first helping consisted of fried rice, bourbon chicken, and beef and broccoli. I was teased by the bourbon chicken because that was my overwhelming favorite consumption and it was the first thing I ate. The fried rice was dry and the beef and broccoli were bland.

Most of the food was Chinese that you would see anywhere else, but not as good. Almost everything I ate, I was regretting while chewing.

I wasn’t a fan of the low mien, the sweet and sour chicken didn’t come with sweet and sour sauce (catching a trend here?), and the white rice was served in a crockpot and was dry and sticky. The general tso’s chicken was one of two things I ate twice, not as bad as some of the options.

The buffet had a decent variety of Chinese foods, but a few things stuck out to me. A random helping of onion rings…onion rings? Why do they have onion rings? Spare ribs on a stick, the insides of which looked like a dead phoenix, except that would probably taste better.

Also, something that they called “Crab Ragoon” looked like a mini tortilla bowl that you would get at Taco Bell, but it was folded four times. The outside of it was so hard that explains the presence of a dentist right next door.

The buffet is just one option. They do have individual meals, which might be better, since it really can’t get much worse.

Not only did the food taste bad, but just the smell of it made a friend sitting next to me sick. He had to get up and leave the restaurant because he felt uneasy.

The food made me nauseous less than a half an hour after eating there. For the rest of the day, my stomach was protesting my decision to review China Wok.