Curry buffet – All You Can Eat/Eat All You Can for £8, includes refillable soft drink.

Curry, unlike say, Chinese food (or a platter of chicken drumsticks) does not lend itself well to the whole Scoff What You Can buffet deal.  Reason being you reach your curry-consumption limit by filling up an awful lot quicker than you do when topping off your duck pancakes with rice + noodles + more rice + more noodles all smothered with miscellaneous meats and sauces.  Which is odd, because they’re very similar dishes in theory.  Meat, sauce, rice.  Maybe it’s the spiciness of curry that brings you to a halt faster.

I found myself deep into my third plate of curry buffet when, embarrassingly, my body came to a complete stop and I was no longer able to feed.  The curry sweats intensified as I briefly considered the possibility of me suffering a minor stroke there and then.  Eventually I realised I was undergoing the curious condition of being “full”, whilst still having food on my plate.  My “raised-in-the-80s” instincts kicked in as I thought of all the starving children in Africa and I anxiously endeavoured to at least finish all the meat remaining on my plate, but to no avail.

The food itself was actually good quality for a buffet, freshly made, loads of choice, all the old favourites: tasty chicken tikka massala, potent madras, beef and lamb dishes, veggie options, rices, naans, for some reason onion rings, poppadum-preaches, the works.  Also included was the option to run along the drinks machine topping your beverage up with ginger ale, irn bru, coke, sprite and everything else into one eye-watering glass of George’s Marvellous Medicine.

The kicker, however, was the price.  £8 is far too much for what it is – you can get a nice meal for that in city centre.  Maybe Grand Buffet works best as a one-off treat when there’s a few of you wanting a spicy curry fix, or maybe if you’re in the middle of an all day session and need sustenance quick; and with a sort of out-of-the-way cafe ambience, it suffices but doesn’t impress.

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