Long Island Restaurants

East Buffet

CHINESE. In our society of plenty, less is more: The Brooke Astors and Tom Fords of the world pick at manicured miniatures round the dinner table, experiencing gastronomic brilliance from a few minute bites. Oafs like myself, contrarily, are to be found in cut-rate casinos and cruise ships, exulting at a fifth plate of corned beef hash.

Let's face it. There's something about buffets that is just déclassé.

Which is why East Buffet, Flushing's most opulent feeding-trough, is such a find.

For one thing, it's very nice. There is no cafeteria vibe here; it's a real restaurant, with tablecloths, tall plants, rippling water over flat glass planes, and enough room to keep the din of devouring to a minimum.

And although the sheer quantity of food is mind-boggling, it doesn't appear in the copious heaps you sometimes find in lesser buffets. Most of the trays contain only enough food for a few diners; they run out before they get cold, or would if the servers weren't so brisk and attentive in refilling them with fresh replacements.

But how good is the food? It wouldn't be fair to compare it to the best Chinese food in Flushing, or, for that matter, to the a la carte restaurant downstairs. But with a few exceptions, it's better than you would expect. I steered clear of the clams in black bean sauce, many of which seemed to be mined of their briny cargo by space-conscious consumers. Both the char-siu (roast pork) and the ribs, though meaty and sweet, suffered from exposure. And I gave a wide berth to the cheese tortellini and other Italian dishes, which East Buffet's customers seem to have an inexplicable fondness for.

A word about these customers. Buffets are assumed widely to be as inauthentic as they are tawdry, but this one is neither. Nearly all of East Buffet's customers are Asian and seem more than happy with these offerings.

It wasn't hard to see why. There are more than 160 items available here. The soup station includes everything from borscht to shark-fin soup, with the best of the lot being a remarkable sweet taro soup, filled with gummy little tapioca balls. At the hot stations, I was impressed with the Sichuan shrimp, shell-on and spicy; pan-fried seafood rolls, moist dumplings with a pleasingly fishy taste beneath their crisp surfaces; teriyaki chicken, plump and juicy boneless thighs dusted with sesame and marinated long enough to take on an almost cure-like saltiness.

Steamed king crab claws were good, but baked and breaded whole blue crabs were even better. And best of all was crunchy deep-fried frog, greaseless and delicate beneath the tempura breading.

I moved on to the Peking duck station, where a polite lady carved up mahogany fowl, carefully pulling away excess fat and nonjudgmentally placing it atop an already loaded plate. But what's this? A sushi station? With a real raw bar? How could I resist? The sushi here is fresh enough to taste good, if not to be exactly vibrant, but it's of a high quality, and there is no arguing with the oysters, shucked before your eyes.

My second trip was taken up with sushi, the best of which was a thick and supple eel; but I also took pains to dip, for research's sake, into the salad bar and its numerous bright bean salads. Subsequent trips included a cameo appearance at the barbecue and satay station, where spicy but unfortunately cool grilled meats can be reinvigorated by a thick and pungent peanut sauce; a wonton station where dumplings are boiled, steamed and sometimes fried; and a fruit station, with beautifully carved melon, strawberries, pineapple and big purple grapes completing the effect of this Asian cornucopia.

Desserts are visually stunning, and in some cases interesting. The jelly station includes such exotic variations as lychee and "grass jelly," which are stimulating palate cleansers, if nothing else; a trio of familiar gelatins, nice and soft; dozens of cakes and pies, all rather pedestrian; and little tubs of pudding, about which the less said, the better.

Being beside myself with pleasure, sated urges and the thrill of excess, the buffet had, as usual, gotten the better of me.--Josh Ozersky

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