This blogger is stuffed! Two all I can eat places in a row! This place, Buffet Fortuna, has two locations, one in Oakland, and one on 1330 Washington Ave in SL. Once again their entrance is not on East 14th, but they do have a large presence on the street, so I just had to try it out. Yelp reviews weren’t helping much with my desire to eat here, but I have had perfectly pleasant meals where reviews were low before. Maybe this would be one of them.
Nope!
We went for their buffet of Dim Sum advertised on their website for just $9.25 a person! What a deal! Well we were both charged $14.95 each, and there was nary a Dim nor a Sum in sight. There was some sushi (at a Chinese food buffet?) and several other items that you might expect to see in a steam table type Chinese food place. Beef broccoli, ginger chicken, chow mein, etc. Dim Sum is Cantonese for snack, apparently, and the only snack-like items were chicken tenders and shriveled wontons.
Oddly enough they had crab on the buffet line too, which is odd for the middle of the summer right? Well it tasted like it had been in the freezer since it was caught, whenever that was, and tasted completely bland, much like the chicken tenders did!
I did my due diligence as a professional reporter and got a second plate; maybe I chose all the wrong things for my first try…The ribs were dessicated and inedible, the wonton soup was too bland, yet salty, the mac and cheese was just plain old not good, and the sweet and sour pork was just OK.
Props to the sushi chef here though. It was probably the only thing from asking for my money back. Maybe they need to reconsider the theme of this huge, mostly empty restaurant.
Distance traveled:
Buffet Fortuna: 2.0 miles roundtrip
Total traveled so far: 21.9 miles