China Palace - Take 2

6605 Airport Blvd.

Austin, TX  78752

(512) 451-0918

Recently I reviewed a take out lunch from China Palace.  It was pretty good and I was hungry for Chinese, and I wanted to do the buffet thing, and so I decided to try China Palace again...I wish I hadn't.

It wasn't terrible, but it was much worse than the take out lunch.  I tried Pork Dumplings, Sesame Chicken, General Tso's Chicken, Egg Rolls, Hot and Sour Soup, and both white and fried rice.

Let me start with the good parts.  The Pork Dumplings were good.  I call them Pot Stickers and they were well cooked and tasty.  The Sesame Chicken was tasty, and so was the Egg Roll.  Nothing really wrong with them, but only the Pot Stickers seemed to pop.

But, there were some definitely a few bad things.  The Sesame Chicken pieces were still huge, but they were also a bit chewy.  There was hardly any sauce in the pan on the steam table.  Mixing the sauce with rice is part of the draw of Sesame Chicken, and it was missing.  The Egg Rolls were tiny, but that is okay on a buffet, because you just grab one or more extras.  The Hot and Sour Soup....wasn't....it wasn't hot in either definition of the word.  It was tepid, and it was dull, almost tasteless.  This was a big disappointment.  The fried rice was okay, but the white rice was hard...well, at least there was a crust on top.

In addition to some of the things just not being very good, there was a general problem with details.  The Soy Sauce was in a bowl with a spoon on the side of the buffet.  I prefer to use Soy Sauce almost as a dip, for dumplings and Egg Rolls, but I couldn't...well, I finally grabbed a soup bowl and spooned a bit into that, but it only worked so well.

The lunch buffet runs from 11:00 to 2:00, and I arrived about 12:45.  Why do I mention this?  Because I think this was the cause of the problem.  It really looked as if most of that food had been put out at 11:00 and left under the lights on the steam table for more than 90 minutes.  The sauce that was plentiful in my take out lunch was non-existent.  The soup that was hot and tasty was no longer, if it ever was.

The whole experience left me with the feeling that getting rid of all the food was more important than ensuring a good eating experience for late comers to the buffet.  I have seen this elsewhere, but never quite this egregious.  I was quite disappointed and I am reconsidering my earlier review.