Century Hotel Dinner Buffet

Ugh.

I'm sorry, but for P900++, I expected more from this dinner buffet.

The cafe had several sections dedicated to different types of food; Appetizers, which you have a whole section to chose from, a separate salad section, a main course section, an area for chinese entrees like dimsum, another for make-your-own-pastas, another one for make-your-own-grills, and yet another one for make-your-own-noodle-soup, a sushi section, and another one for dessert.

Sounds like a wide range of choices?

Well, not really, if you could actually been there to see the state that all the food was in.

The food seemed like it has been standing around for several days already, quite dry and lacking in pomp. The dimsum section was a cheat, as it simply coined siomai and dumplings as a different dish, but they just simply differed in presentation: the first was partially wrapped up with the top showing, and the latter was completely wrapped up in dumpling wrapper. The salad section would've been nice - it had all sorts of stuff, corn, tomatoes, mushrooms, hams ... all the standard stuff - if it weren't for the obvious browning of lettuce leaves evident in the vegetable bowl. By this time you'd wonder how long the other non-obvious food items in the salad section has been left there... to rot. The grill section looked like it was a makeshift main entree area with the metal casing covers, but contained raw food items, which were a bit ludicrous. To top it all off, one of the trays had whole eels in them. Now how appetizing is that? The noodle section seemed to be in a similar state... browning salmons? I don't think so.

I'm sure when they were first created they looked sumptuous, but there should be such a thing as quality control, especially coming from a hotel. I was even expecting to see mold as the food seemed like as if they've been left untouched and unreplenished for some time already. Even if the area has lost its appeal to the classy yuppie and business area shouldn't be an excuse to lose its quality; the new Hyatt I've been to the last time also in the same vicinty had a pretty good offering for their breakfast buffets; I'd expect they have the same quality for their dinner buffets also.

The only noteworthy items that I stuffed myself on were 2 things: (1) the bread and butter and (2) the crepe section. At least they had a decent crepes, albeit simple. There's no choice for the crepes though, but its still a long shot from the browning salad leaves as this came off as freshly made, and was not much of a put off. For the price, I'm pretty disappointed. If all buffets were the case, no wonder people nowadays choose Brazil Brazil at Powerplant, Portico or Cafe Breton... for the price paid for these establishments, they're worth a lot more for a lot less, and much more filling.

And you thought I was becoming a bit too generous and patronizing for all these food place reviews :P