Chinese buffet restaurants come in a variety of flavors, some excellent and some good. The Jade Palace is definitely excellent. It’s in a nondescript-looking, one-story orange stucco building on the corner of Cobb Parkway and Windy Ridge Parkway in Atlanta, Georgia, about a block north of the I-285 perimeter (just south of Marietta).
There seems to be ample seating for the lunch crowd, which starts arriving just before Noon and continues until shortly past 2:00 PM, at which time the restaurant calms noticeably. However, an ample supply of fresh hot food, an enthusiastic wait staff and excellent food keep the restaurant very busy during the lunch and dinner hours. The restaurant is clean and well-lit. Although it’s tastefully decorated and the furniture is quite good, ambience isn’t the strong point of most Chinese buffets – good, fresh, well-cooked food is, in plentiful quantities. The Jade Palace lives up to expectations!
Prices are very good for both the lunch and the dinner buffets (lunch is $6.43 weekdays, $6.95 weekends and dinner is $8.95 every evening). Of course, a full a la carte menu is available, but with all the opportunities available at the buffet, I’ve rarely seen any diners ordering from the menu.
The wait staff is cheerful and unobtrusive. You’re escorted quickly to your seat and asked for your beverage preference, after which you’re on your own!
The buffet is actually much more varied than most “traditional” Chinese buffets, with a respectable sushi bar and an excellent Mongolian Bar-B-Que. (The Jade Palace proudly advertises it as a “Special No Oil Mongolian Grilled BBQ.”)
A fresh salad is always a nice beginning to a meal, and the salad at the Jade Palace is exceptionally fresh, with routine ingredients like iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, onions, shredded cheese, olives pickles, and a few standard dressings (Italian, French, Ranch). Another favorite meal starter is soup, and I can’t recommend the Hot and Sour Soup enough – well populated with mushrooms, tofu, and egg flowers, it carries a dusky, smoky flavor that’ll start you wondering if you should go for seconds on the soup. Much as I hate to dissuade you, though, I’ve got to recommend that you stop after one bowl of soup – there’s just too much other food to taste! If Hot and Sour Soup isn’t to your taste, you’re sure to enjoy the WonTon Soup or the traditional Egg Drop Soup.
The sushi bar features a number of (non-fish) offerings, such as California Rolls and Philadelphia Rolls, as well as nigiri-sushi with cooked shrimp and some very intricately-wrapped sushi that’s so delightful to look at, it seems a shame to eat it!
The sushi is delicious, though. The rice is neither too sticky nor too loose, and it’s exceptionally well-seasoned. The wasabi is a little watery, but that’s fairly easy to compensate for when mixing it with soy sauce, and the shoga (pickled ginger) is excellent. And, one of the best aspects of a buffet – it’s all you can eat!
Don’t fill up on the sushi, though – there’s too much else happening in the buffet room to justify spending all your time at the sushi bar!
I usually start my meal with a small selection of sushi, a bowl of soup, and some appetizer-type food – fried foods. Jade Palace has excellent Crab Rangoon, egg rolls and spring rolls, and always has a heaping tray of fried chicken wings available.
I pace my eating. Once I have my salad, soup, sushi and appetizers, I return to my table and enjoy the food for a while before returning for my “entrée.”
Included in the very reasonable cost of the buffet is a Mongolian Barbecue. This is usually a flat round metal grill, usually centered in the cooking area. Meals are prepared on it one or two at a time, depending on the size of the grill and the number of chefs. I’ve never seen a single chef successfully prepare more than a single meal at a time, though. The grill here seems to be a traditional American commercial grill – rectangular, with splashbacks and drainage in the front. Sort of what you might find at McDonald’s back in the day, but that’s where the similarity ends, because the artist standing behind this grill is definitely not your teenage burger jockey.
At a Mongolian Barbecue, you choose your food and your spices, and it’s cooked for you before your eyes. You start with an empty bowl, and load into it whatever fresh, raw food you want – celery, Bok Choi, mushrooms, onions, peppers, squash, noodles, etc . . . as well as your choice of fresh sliced beef, pork, or chicken, or raw shrimp. Load up your bowl as high as you want – this is a buffet! – and hand it to the chef. (If this is your first time at a Mongolian Barbecue, I recommend you just try a little bit of everything, and fine tune in later visits.)
Most Mongolian Barbecues I’ve visited let you load your bowl with seasonings, oils and sauces yourself; the Jade Palace keeps those ingredients by the chef and he’ll ask you what your desires are. The choices here are pretty simple – four mild-to-hot sauces, with a choice of light (one ladle) to heavy (three ladles). Again, unless you’re familiar with the sauces, I recommend you start out by choosing a mild sauce. Once you’ve chosen your seasoning, just stand back and admire the chef’s artistry as he unloads your bowl of food onto the grill and starts grilling it.
Your Mongolian Barbecue only takes a few moments to cook – the meat’s the most crucial ingredient that requires cooking, and it’s sliced so thin it’s done very quickly. And always try to give the chef a tip – a $1 bill in a bowl on the counter – in recognition of his skill and artistry.
Although your Mongolian Barbecue is more than enough for a big entrée, you may want to sample a few of the other entrées available from the buffet. While these are generally commonplace offerings like General Tso’s Chicken and beef (or chicken) with broccoli, one of the things that makes the jade Palace such an enjoyable meal is the freshness of the food. Because of the restaurant’s popularity, it’s obvious that the food doesn’t have the chance to grow old and unappetizing sitting on a steam table.
Other buffet entrées include such items as roast chicken, fried rice, lo mein, salt and pepper chicken, a variety of vegetables, skewered chicken, Chinese-style spare ribs and a wide variety of other selections that will change daily.
A nice feature of most Chinese buffets is the attentiveness of the wait staff, and the staff at the Jade Palace lives up to expectations. Whenever you’re done with the food on your plate, someone will quietly slip by and take your dirty used tableware.
Especially compared with the appetizers and entrées available, desert at the Jade Palace may seem rather pedestrian. Tasty and plentiful, but pedestrian – chocolate or vanilla pudding, assorted Jello, chocolate or vanilla ice cream (soft-serve), plus a selection of fresh fruits and boxed pastries acquired fresh daily (Napoleans and creampuffs) from a local bakery . . . Let’s face it – although it’s a nice end to a great meal, if you’ve got the room, nobody comes to a Chinese Buffet for the desert.
The Jade Palace is located at 2647 Cobb Parkway in Atlanta. It’s open for lunch from 11:00 AM until 4:00 PM for lunch, and from 4:00 PM until 10:0 PM for dinner every day. It occupies a special niche in the array of lunchtime offerings available to those lucky enough to find themselves near the Galleria or Cumberland Mall around lunchtime. I
