Crown Buffet

Chinese is my favourite food and a buffet is even better! The value for money is excellent, £15 for fresh to order all you can eat.
Sadly, the food is a big let down. I have been to countless restaurants and chinese take aways and this was the blandest, most flavourless Chinese food i’ve ever tasted.
Décor was a standard Chinese setting with cheesy Chinese pop music in the background. Service was excellent, there was always someone available to clear up and take our orders. Sadly, the food was the big let down.

My friend’s father came to visit Leeds and they asked me to take them to a Chinese buffet. I only knew red hot and origins 7 but both of them are not just Chinese. While going through Unilocal I found this hidden gem. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew it existed being not even 5 mins walk from another friend’s house but never been there to eat. So i believed in my co-​yelpers and took my friend and his dad there. We were not disappointed. They liked it so much that they forgot to take photos of the food to show it off until it was almost time for dessert. I really enjoyed it there. The atmosphere was really nice, the service was very good and the food was also good. While I was there I noticed a family was having hot pot. This got me quite excited because I always wanted to have a hotpot experience so next time I go there I’m planning on investigating further.

I’m a sucker for a buffet, though they’re dangerous. I nonchalantly approach the counter and casually test out a few dishes, but before long I inevitably become the girl sat in front of the edible mountain holding a knife & fork and maniacally laughing. I’m especially a sucker for a Chinese buffet, so I tried to hide my glee at stumbling across this place on a random afternoon plagued with hunger pangs.
Our waiter took us to our table, took our drinks order & then waved his hand like a magician in the direction of The Food. And there was a feast in store… All the usual favourites: spring rolls, prawn toast, wan tons, sweet and sour chicken, chilli beef, chicken in black bean sauce. I’d say the mains seemed varied but limited (though we didn’t really check out the Mongolian buffet section, mostly because it wasn’t manned and I wasn’t sure if it was open.) Frustratingly, the signs describing the dishes were all pretty muddled so there was some guesswork involved with picking things I’d like, but I was impressed that they had duck pancakes. It’s quite the rarity to find them at a buffet, but they were really delicious. The spring onion/​cucumber to go with it didn’t seem as fresh as the rest of the food, but they were still really tasty. They also had a huge array of desserts — cakes, ice cream, fruit, and these strange but lovely deep fried sesame banana frittery numbers. Worth a try!
For £11 (in the evening — days are cheaper) for as much as you can shovel lovingly into your mouth, it’s fairly reasonable — the food is a good standard but I wouldn’t call it gourmet by any stretch. Also, they have a note in the small print that they reserve the right to charge you extra if you leave an excessive amount of food on your plate, which isn’t too bad if they’ve labelled the food correctly and you’re not picking things a little haphazardly, but be careful otherwise.

So, you’re in town, and you’re near the bottom end when you suddenly feel the shaky weakness that is a crippling hunger. What do you do? Do you crawl back up into town and hope to get served within 30 seconds flat? Do you call a cab and pray your housemates have magically sensed this danger and cooked you a proper roast dinner? No, friends. You go to Crown Buffet.
This happened to me. I was feeling rather faint, we were straggling down that end, and before us was this gem. Steaming out tempting smells and cooing us with ready made plates of stuffage. A dream come true. And an odd location for a massive buffet. But who cares? It’s hot and it’s there.
Now, I don’t often partake of buffet because no matter how much my eyes tell me I can eat, my stomach disagrees. I just can’t eat huge portions. But today was the day to really test this! You go in, order a drink, and waste no time. I love it. The waiter had strong aftershave, no problem, the food smelled even better. There are three whole sides to walk around, with everything from curry, sweet and sour, satay, seaweed, chicken balls, chips, duck pancakes and more. There’s even a Mongolian buffet, but we didn’t make it to that. I filled my plate twice, and noted the ribs and chicken balls as particularly good. The crispy chicken bits are sweet too, but too many is a bit sickly sweet.
And then there’s the darling pudding trays. Mini coconut jelly, fruit, cheesecake and more — all convincing you to come back and keep going. So much so I ate my jelly with a fork. And it worked. Weird. Of particular note are the little toffee sesame dough things. No idea. Loved ‘em.
Space wise, it’s huge. And clean. And not too kitsch. But I wasn’t paying attention, I was stuffing it all in. Basically, it’s fantastic. About a tenner means you can eat all you want, and whilst it remains that I can’t eat much in one go, that’s still a decent amount for a tenner. Even cheaper on a lunch! Give ‘em a go. It ain’t the likes of Red Chilli, but it does the job.

Being just outside town next to bikes shops and offices sloud not put u off this place is good cos as buffets food goes its nice. and the foods warm and fresh tasting. lunch time its around £6.50 and a coke round £ 2. £11.50 ather 5 with more food like the
mongolian buffet loads of raw veg and meat and 5 sauces to pick form and the chef cooks in front of in a big wok .
great serivces and they give me a free Chinese calendar

Having finally climbed down from the ceiling after my last pink gloop injection at Crown Buffet I have decided to give it a review… and I was rather surprised to find myself the first to do so.
Can it be that only a select band of us are propping this business up with our monthly pilgrimage to Pork and Prawn Land? Or is it simply that the regular clientele are so coked up on MSG that they are too syndactylus to operate a keyboard.
Both are viable explanations.
To find Crown Buffet you will need to wander into the ZombieLand behind the bottom of the Headrow, where once there was a thriving Chinese community with supermarkets, restaurants and a crackingly kitsch pool hall. Thankfully Leeds Council stepped in to ‘redevelop’ the area.
So now there’s nothing.
In true Never Ending Story style you have to walk past ‘The Nothing’, under the ring road and there amongst the Squirrel Storage (who knew they had gone high tech?), abandoned office blocks and people who want to save on parking and are prepared to walk you will find a fantastic old school board building that has been converted into the only functioning chinese restaurant in the area.
Crown Buffet is not going to win any internal style awards, unlike my digestive system– which I have been told personally by a Gastroenterologist is «Fabulous!». Think school canteen where the children get to eat nought but sugar and you have the idea… in fact you have the review right there.
For around £6 during the day and £10 after 6pm you can gorge your sweet ass senseless on some frankly pretty well prepared, cleanly presented and varied Chinese and Mongolian classics. And there was me thinking I would never ever get to use the term ‘Mongolian classics’ in my entire literary experience.
There’s even a Mongolian grill where you can pick your meats and choose from exponentially hotter sauces to be combined in front of you by a very warm person wielding a very large pan over a very large flame for your amusements. And there’s a wide choice of pudding from fruit to cake to ice cream.
So why just 3 stars? Well I just can’t get past the bright lightbulbs, trestle tables and overwhelming feeling that I’m sitting at an oriental Butlin’s feeding trough. The food is GREAT, the staff are friendly and you’ll waddle home hugely content if not more than a little uncomfortable but it lacks that one key thing… being an actually vaguely Chinese experience.
Come on Crown Buffet. Give me a few fans on the walls, a splash of red, some plant life and that Whitney Houston type singer belting out show tunes in Mandarin as I cram your various good and tasty things into my excited maw.
Or at least give me chopsticks.
Pretty please?