Red Hot World Buffet

Been afew times now and never disappoints great choice of food always clean and hot well priced and will keep on going back

With buffets that do Chinese I always head straight for the Crispy Aromatic Duck: big mistake here! Duck it may have been (half the table thought it was probably chicken), but aromatic or crispy it certainly wasn’t; rather than fresh cucumber and spring onion it came with something labeled as «leek», but which could easily have been the cardboard box the leeks were delivered in.
Add to this the slow drinks service, the difficulty of getting new cutlery when they took your used plates away and the cold (quite a lot if people were eating wearing coats so it wasn’t just me) and this is a place I really don’t want to go back to.
Some of the other food wasn’t bad so they avoid a 1 rating. Just.

Yesterday evening was my first experience at the Red Hot World Buffet. It’s not that this place was absolutely terrible, but I can’t imagine I’ll be going back any time soon.
First, it’s worth noting that this is a review of the newer, bigger Red Hot World Buffet at the Corner House, having moved from much smaller premises in Hockley. And when I say ‘bigger’, I mean this place is an Airplane Hangar of Buffet. It is so big that twice I actually lost the people I was ‘dining’ with.
Red Hot (World) Buffet is sold as a ‘social dining experience’ — you walk in and it’s dressed up like an airport where you ‘check in’ to your table and visit the microcosmic areas of the world, like a much smaller Epcot Center, to get your regional dishes. There’s Indian, Chinese, American, Japanese, etc. You are not waited upon — you have to go and fetch the food yourself, which makes sense; this is a buffet after all. However, the handful of people I went with yesterday all have a) very different tastes, and b) very different eating habits. Consequently, the social dining experience wasn’t very social at all.
As an example: once we sat down and ordered our drinks, we all got up together to get our food. Now, I cannot emphasise this enough: this place is HUGE. Almost immediately we went off in different directions to find something we all liked. We probably wandered around for five minutes or so, and I came back to our table with a relatively tame selection of prawn toast, pizza and some samosas… but one of my friends had almost finished his plate of food, so barely a minute after I sat down, he was up again to get some more.
And this went on; during the evening, there were usually never more than three people at the table at any one time, meaning I didn’t really get to spend the evening with the people I went to dinner with.
This is not entirely Red Hot World Buffet’s fault; it is the very nature of their chain that they are a buffet. However, I feel they are pushing a ‘social’ selling point that doesn’t really work out.
As for the food: I would describe it as not entirely awesome. During the course of the evening, I had: crab claws (nice); samosas (fine); pizza (reheated & dry); chips (bleurgh); noodles (nice); cheesecake (warm?! bleurgh!); and chocolate mousse (fine, but also warm).
There are certain stations where you can order a particular dish, and the burger bar is one of those. I ordered what was labelled as a ‘Supreme Burger’, which was *supposed* to be a beefburger with cheese and bacon. I asked for mine without any garnish or relish. What I received was a single, dry beefburger with onions and brown sauce. It was, I am sorry to say, extraordinarily gross.
At the risk of sounding like a pedant (which I most definitely am), the signs labelling ALL of the food were a) rendered in Comic Sans, black text on a dark red background (i.e. barely readable), and b) almost universally misspelled. Some examples:
— ‘Burger with chilly’
— ‘Vinilla Flavour’
— ‘Sticky Date Pudding: Egg less’ (less than what?)
— ‘Tiramasu Venician Style’
I don’t even know how pronounce that last one.
I know this may sound facetious and flippant, but adding this all together with the food and my experience throughout the evening, the impression I got is one of general laziness and a lack of any kind of quality control, and it reminded me very much of 11 years of lunchtimes at a state school.
As far as I’m concerned, Red Hot World Buffet is a Warehouse of School Dinners.

Awesome buffet I love the cakes and chocolates