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Five Bucks, Five Dishes, High Five? Lunch Box Buffet/Fay Da Bakery in Midtown West

Posted by Ed Levine, February 24, 2009 at 11:00 PM

Photographs by Robyn Lee

Five dishes, five dollars. That's the deal at the 34th Street branch of Lunch Box Buffet inside Fay Da, the Chinese bakery mini-chain with ten locations in Manhattan and Queens. Serious Eater Gordon Mark, our intrepid cheap Chinatown eats explorer, originally led us to this branch because he liked that he could get a vast array of Chinese baked goods and baked or steamed buns within walking distance of Serious Eats World HQ. Gordon is partial to the kosher hot dog baked bun, and so am I. A kosher hot dog encased in a sweet, doughy bun for a buck. What's not to like?

But last week Robyn informed us, in her own offhanded way, that the steam table food in back looked good when she took a gander before dropping off a friend at Penn Station. So fueled by Gordon's initial exploration, Robyn's low-key, low-expectations-fueled endorsement, and Zach Brooks' post on Midtown Lunch, the Serious Eaters invaded Fay Da, determined to carefully eyeball the seemingly endless variety of buffet items.

In this sea of cheap options could we find five delicious dishes to fill up each neat little compartment in Lunch Box Buffet's unique, Chinese-style TV dinner styrofoam container?

Cold options. Probably best to skip.

Robyn, Erin, and I each paid our five bucks (actually I plunked down a tenspot for a double) and we made our way down the line. We skipped the cold salad bar, which featured many, many pasta salads, coleslaw, potato salad, and even a seaweed concoction. I circled back to the salad bar a week later and put together this not-very-pretty melange.

Clockwise from top left: pork meatball, curry chicken, double cooked pork, rice noodles, and chicken with oyster sauce.

My Fay Da Fab Five x 2 included superfine rice noodles with pork and sesame chicken that are located in the vast middle of the buffet options. The noodles were limp (what did I expect—this is a steam table, so those noodles were getting limper by the second), and the sesame chicken tasted no better and no worse than a million other orange chickens you can get at Chinese take-out joints all over America. If you got it at an airport you'd be thrilled. Here, with no departure gate in sight, not so much.

Other tasty, if not thrilling, choices included twice cooked pork made with what tasted like pork shavings and tofu, and a pork meatball that was, well, quite porky (and Serious Eaters know that's a compliment).

I passed over the pig's feet, but I do admire the fact that they served them.

Clockwise from top left: barbecued spare ribs, sesame chicken, string beans, curried fried chicken drumstick, and kung po chicken.

At the end of the steam table, just as I was about to despair and proclaim there's nothing seriously delicious to eat at the Lunch Box Buffet steam table, I found a trio of gems worth at least double or triple the dollar they cost.

Little barbecued spare ribs, at least as much bone and fat as meat, were tasty in their red, viscous, very sweet barbecue sauce.

Chicken with oyster sauce was succulent quarter-inch slices of tender, moist, dare I say delicate, almost boneless slices of dark meat poultry.

And finally, the folks here definitely saved the best for last: a big old curried fried chicken drumstick.

Soy sauce chicken and curried fried chicken drumsticks.

So when I went back, and oh yes, we will probably end up regulars, I got three fried chicken drumsticks and two orders of chicken with oyster sauce for my five dollars. Think of it, that could be lunch and dinner, reducing my cost to $2.50 a meal. That's even cheaper than the recession special at Gray's Papaya these days.

On my next trip, I'm thinking of mixing and matching steam table items and baked goods. Now that's what I call a seriously delicious combination plate.

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Tags: Chinese, deals, Fay Da, Lunch Box Buffet, Manhattan, Midtown West, Penn Station

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