Five to try: All you can eat buffets

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Appealing and vivacious: East Room

DRAGON KING
Royale Leisure Park, Kendal Avenue, W3
(020 8993 3888) £20
The owner of Dragon King was apparently inspired by the Heavenly Palace in Beijing. A lofty gateway guarded by lions goes some way to balance what is inevitably a self-limiting finesse in Chinese buffet food. At lunch (from £5.50 for all you can eat) there is a choice of 30 dishes. At dinner (from £11.50) there is a parade of 60 displayed beneath tasselled red lanterns. Nothing alarmingly unfamiliar and plenty of scope for vegetarians.

THE EAST ROOM
2a Tabernacle Street, EC2 (020 7374 9570) £34
A discreet, aka hard to find, entrance gives a clue that this is fundamentally a club, one in the same ownership as Soho's Milk & Honey. Ring to find out rules of access for non-members as they keep changing. Two good reasons to visit are the wide range of southern hemisphere wines available by the glass from the Enomatic system and the lunch and dinner buffets, which defy the genre by being appealing and vivacious.

TIBITS
12-14 Heddon Street, W1 (020 7758) £20
Launched eight years ago in Zurich by the Swiss Frei brothers, vegetarian Tibits has come to the West End and the Westfield shopping centre in White City, where it occupies a site on
“Eat-Street”. Serve yourself 0from the food “boat” and your choice is weighed and charged per 100g. It is easy to underestimate financially the heft of, say, grated carrots but salads are quite enterprising and some of the dressings inventive. Hot food is available and juices are freshly squeezed throughout the day.

KITCHIN N1
8 Caledonia Street, N1 (020 7713 8777) £22
Office-party organisers might be interested in this 220-seater near King's Cross where for a fixed price — currently £6.95/12.95 for lunch/ dinner — punters can help themselves to as much as they want of Chinese, Indian, Thai and Italian food (the doubtful explanation is the historic spice route) prepared in an open central kitchen. There is even a wok station for instant stir-fries. Quality is relatively high, so long as the urge to pile up a mismatch is resisted.

THE WINTER GARDEN
The Landmark, 222 Marylebone Road, NW1 (020 7631 8000) £70 (champagne Sunday brunch)
The grand hotel buffet seems a thing of the past, which explains why you must book ahead for the Sunday buffet brunch at a set price of £70 including as much champagne as you want in this wondrous hotel lobby reminiscent of an Escher drawing. Live music and attentive staff accompany soups, seafood, salads, Sunday roasts and desserts. A huge blow-out with masses of fizz seems better than — albeit similar to — Gordon Brown's prescriptions for the recession.

Prices estimate a meal with wine for one.

 

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