Arirang Garden (lunch buffet)

For starters, I am SO done with buffets. The food is either dry from the heat lamps or soggy from languishing in sauces/juices/oils. The fried foods (though plentiful) have lost their crispiness. And desserts are represented disproportionately. And I eat too much. It's hard to be disciplined in the face of overwhelming choices and free refills.

That said, the only buffet I can't stay away from is Arirang Garden's lunch buffet. Maybe it's that Korean food lends itself to surviving the ill effects of the heat lamps. Maybe it's because there's nothing fried (besides the donuts). Maybe, no scratch that, definitely... It's definitely because of the soup. A simple beef broth swimming with iceberg-sized hunks of daikon. As your bowl quickly fills with the radishes (tender but not mushy), you fish around the bottom of the deep kettle for the kalbi. Beef ribs so tender they fall off the bones. Simmered for hours & spiked with just enough white pepper to give it a buzz, the Kalbi-Tang is so comforting, it top my "last supper" list. When I first got my braces last year had trouble eating pretty much everything, I came here & had a soul-affirming meal of just rice and the soup.

I leave my beefy trance briefly & try to balance out my meal w/ some of my favorite foods in the world: pan chan. The little plates of pickled vegetables that always come with every Korean meal are spread out over the cold buffet, everything from bean sprouts & marinated mushrooms to radishes (spicy & not) & the ubiquitous kim chee. And if you're lucky, a little fish cake.

The hot plate is rounded out with jap chae (savory sauteed clear rice noodles), bolgogi (tender marinated beef), daeji bolgogi (more sweet than spicy pork) and some variation on budae jigae (a slightly spicy "army stew" with hot dogs, fish cake & sticky rice cake). Avoid the stale donuts unless you enjoy punishing your teeth.

I usually get two small servings of everything, (heavy on the pan chan & occasional sushi roll) and as much soup as I can down.

Yes, I do overeat here as well but I never leave feeling weighed down. If you decide to quit all buffets*, let this be your *.