Lessons learned from cheap buffet

All you can eat ye say? well sir, I would like to jump aboard that train. Who doesn't? It's the best way to dine and it's cheap. Although sometimes it can be too cheap.

We decided to go to Chinatown for some food. First, it's not a town, it's 

about three streets in Soho, where you can get ground tiger balls, OKish food and Chinese newspapers. There are also an inordinate amount of betting shops, which really doesn't help with the stereotype.

Anyway, we went up and down the 'town' for a bit and found China China (so good, they named it twice) which boasted "All eat as much as you can" for £8. Well that sounds like a deal. So we went in.

We were ushered upstairs, and straight away it had a Fawlty Towers feel to it. I lived in Hungary for a year, so I am used to shoddy, dodgy dining, but this was pretty bad. Someone had ripped the fire alarm off the wall. I can only imagine it cost a few billion Yen to get through its last health and safety check up.

We took our seats and found out that the £8 was really £8.90. Then we looked round to see our fellow diners. Now we are not snobs per se, but we have come to being used to certain level of quality from our City. Basically there isn't usually any scum hanging about. Scum stay in towns like Halifax and Slough, not the West End of London. But it's near Christmas, people come down to see the lights and to have some cheap Chinese food it seems. Unfortunately we had to sit inches away from them in this woeful Communist cafeteria.

So we ate the God-awful food (the crackers tasted like stale cake, and a good percentage of the meat was unclassifiable) and queued next to scary scallies and fat women who hadn't washed their hair and grunted while eating. Not one person used chopsticks - I mean quite a few seemed to be having difficulty with a knife and a fork.

I can only imagine it was like eating in a cheap Chinese buffet across the road from the Jeremy Kyle studios. Many of these people were probably annoyed that Karen Matthews had thought of it first.

The scary scallies ran out without paying, and the fat kid next to us stared at the wall with his earphones in. Everyone was wearing tracksuit bottoms and most people just ate the stale chips.

You are not supposed to look forward to finishing your meal. We did.

So what did we learn? You get what you pay for, really. Pay £20 each, and you will sit next to people that groom themselves. Pay £8.90, you will sit next to people who consider putting on a clean football shirt as 'dressing up'.