Day 14: Villa 8 Buffet (Yishan)

Today's lunch was a precedent-setting decision for our brute force lunch tour, in that we had to resolve a corner case (literally) regarding whether to go to a restaurant that exists on a corner street within our one-block-deep traversal algorithm. Our decision was that we will go to the restaurant if there exists an entrance onto the property accessible from the street containing the traversal. In this case there was gap in the fence. Niniane was away on some other foreign adventure, so today's lunch included Taher, Alex, and me. The iPhone's front-facing camera is very useful for taking a picture of our lunch group without the introvert-disturbing need to ask a random person on the street to take a picture for us.

I've passed this restaurant many times but never eaten there. The advertised menu is quite intriguing, however, in that it is a pan-asian buffet - and the reality lives up to the hype, at least in quantity and variety if not quality. I was able to combine dim sum, fried chicken, steak, sushi, General Tso's chicken, soups, and soft-serve ice cream all in a single meal. You can see my first plate of food in the picture.

By the second plate, however, the reality of a pan-asian buffet began to set in - namely, that all the food had been cooked in similarly-flavored oils and was thoroughly mediocre in quality. The excitement of the grand variety had began to subside and was replaced with a conversation about McDonalds restaurants in other countries. Incidentally, this restaurant lets you eat free if it's your birthday and your party has five adults, and half-price if your party has three or four adults.