Is the buffet due for a comeback?
The past decade or so hasn’t been kind to your typical all-you-can-eat experience. For starters, the rise of foodie culture rendered the buffet a rather passe experience for the upwardly aspiring, condemned for its emphasis on quantity over quality. Secondly, the late pandemic made many of us leery of shared utensils as a vector of contagion.
Maybe material factors will facilitate the rebirth of the self-service option. After all, our political leaders in Washington seem bound and determined to summon the Fifth Horseman of global economic recession, the mere hints of which already have large portions of the American population jittery about their pocketbooks. Plenty has been written on the appeal of “fast casual dining” in an era when stocks and salaries are on the downslide.
But it wasn’t economic anxiety that drove me to a new buffet down on Stagecoach Road in the area of Otter Creek one Sunday afternoon, located in the same building that housed the brief-lived Little Rock expansion of McClard’s Bar-B-Q. What grabbed me was a sign that read, “La Patrona Asian Sushi Mexican Food Buffet.”
I had passed the spot a few times going back and forth to visit some family and couldn’t get my imagination to square the phrase “Asian Sushi Mexican Food Buffet,” which meant that I had to go inside and experience it myself.
As the wife put it after her first walk around the different buffet lines at La Patrona, “It’s like a refrigerator truck was in an accident.” Tureens of hot and sour soup and wonton soup were placed next to french fries, fried catfish and shrimp, chicken wings, pizza and some kind of deep fried sweet potato thing. Your typical Chinese restaurant fare — vegetable lo mein, fried rice, beef and broccoli, sweet and sour chicken, and a spicy shrimp dish — rubbed elbows with crawdads, boiled crabs, chicken and beef enchiladas and a make-your-own-taco station. The buffet also had sushi, both nigiri and rolls, alongside all of your usual desserts and cold dishes. Plus, there was an ice cream freezer.
The palate isn’t really designed for this sort of dramatic gear-switching. Following a bite of beef and broccoli with a bite of chicken enchilada creates a momentary mental hitch, the feeling that something is not quite right. You’ll experience less dissonance if you devote one plate at a time to a particular broad geographic region rather than mixing and matching the different culinary continents. Most people seemed to be doing this exact thing.
So how was it all? Let’s be honest: A buffet offering this wide of a range of dishes exemplifies the old saw, “jack of all trades, master of none.” One suspects that many items (pizza, enchiladas) arrived frozen. Probably the weakest offerings were the sushi and the enchiladas. They weren’t bad, but they weren’t the most flavorful. (However, each table comes equipped with soy sauce, Sriracha and salsa picante for those in need.) The Chinese dishes on the buffet were much more palatable, the standard fare of Chinese restaurants across the U.S., with a few different vegetarian options for those of us trying to limit our intake of meat. Some of the shrimp dishes were surprisingly good, given that buffet shrimp can tend toward the overcooked and slightly rubbery.
In short, I had a lot of fun just living in the confusion. The staff was impressive, hustling and bustling, never letting anything run out, even during the afternoon peak. But the real delight in eating at La Patrona was the people-watching. At one point, the wife said, “This has to be the single most diverse spot in Little Rock right now.” Looking around, you could see several of those bearded, ball-cap-clad bubbas that are a menace to any all-you-can-eat restaurant’s profit margins, and the next table over was Black family who looked to have come directly from church. We could hear plenty of Spanish spoken and even caught a snatch of what might have been Telugu from a family on their way out.
E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. That’s the motto of this nation, featured on the Great Seal of the United States. Right now, all too many of our ostensible leaders, when not busying themselves with wrecking the global economy, are trying to instantiate a heretical notion of ethnic and cultural purity as the basis for national greatness. If they bother to acknowledge that old motto, they emphasize the Unum a little too hard, insisting that the Pluribus is something that must be shed on the way to attaining a desired national oneness. American greatness, however, is a messier affair, arising from the chaotic interplay of cultures. It’s a smörgåsbord offering lo mein and enchiladas, California rolls and fried catfish, and more. So much more.
La Patrona Asian Sushi Mexican Food Buffet
9219 Stagecoach Road
11:00 a.m.-9:00 p.m. daily
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