Aroma Buffet, London W12: 4 Grace Dent Restaurant Reviews
Food trends come and go, but the all-you-can-eat buffet lives on over the decades. Old fashioned, then cool again, then again downgraded and, at one point in very recent history, even banned. At Aroma Buffet in west London, however – in a shopping mall, up an escalator, next to a Wetherspoons – the vast buffet of noodles, stir-fries and hearty cakes, puddings and ice creams for lunch is £15. The buffet's timing for the return to modern life is impeccable, delivering joy through dark times and trashed wallets. Dinner is priced at £22, while children under 150cm can eat for £11. Anyone whose thrifty relative has ever been smuggled into a car trunk at a safari park will know these rules are for testing.
Aroma's Head Chef swears to me that Marco Pierre White has been in it and, at these prices, he would be crazy not to. For an all you can eat next to a Lidl I think even a food snob could find two, three or more plates of something they really like. On a Thursday lunchtime, there's a department store going out, a few new moms, a birthday party, and lots of couples and solo dinners. The open kitchen is hectic, and no wonder with around 70 dishes on offer; the dinner menu is even more extensive.
Aroma started out serving Cantonese-style crowd pleasers – sticky black bean sauces, heaps of chow mein and breaded pork in sunset orange bittersweet - but these days it's said to be pan-Asian, changing shape to suit the modern British palate, so now there are West Sumatran rendangs and Indonesian nasi goreng, and Malaysian coconut-based stew can be found near a selection of Japanese teppanyaki grills There are freshly made makis, California rolls and dragon rolls Rolled fried ice cream, which you can garnish with KitKat, Oreo, fresh banana, etc. is a big deal in Thailand Look carefully among all the tempur platters has vegetables and the platters of lacquered duck with pancakes, you will also find margarita pizzas, chicken nuggets and, of course, fries. So more pan-world than pan-Asian, but I dare anyone who is hungry to leave without catering to some of their whims.
If I look oddly jubilant Thinking about eating in Singapore with no limit noodles in a mall, maybe it's because I've spent months watching restaurant prices soar to eerily comical levels. Lunch here costs less than a side of boujie patatas bravas I recently had at a much admired restaurant in Bloomsbury. The KitKat ice cream roll, a new experience for me, is particularly delicious because it slides...
Food trends come and go, but the all-you-can-eat buffet lives on over the decades. Old fashioned, then cool again, then again downgraded and, at one point in very recent history, even banned. At Aroma Buffet in west London, however – in a shopping mall, up an escalator, next to a Wetherspoons – the vast buffet of noodles, stir-fries and hearty cakes, puddings and ice creams for lunch is £15. The buffet's timing for the return to modern life is impeccable, delivering joy through dark times and trashed wallets. Dinner is priced at £22, while children under 150cm can eat for £11. Anyone whose thrifty relative has ever been smuggled into a car trunk at a safari park will know these rules are for testing.
Aroma's Head Chef swears to me that Marco Pierre White has been in it and, at these prices, he would be crazy not to. For an all you can eat next to a Lidl I think even a food snob could find two, three or more plates of something they really like. On a Thursday lunchtime, there's a department store going out, a few new moms, a birthday party, and lots of couples and solo dinners. The open kitchen is hectic, and no wonder with around 70 dishes on offer; the dinner menu is even more extensive.
Aroma started out serving Cantonese-style crowd pleasers – sticky black bean sauces, heaps of chow mein and breaded pork in sunset orange bittersweet - but these days it's said to be pan-Asian, changing shape to suit the modern British palate, so now there are West Sumatran rendangs and Indonesian nasi goreng, and Malaysian coconut-based stew can be found near a selection of Japanese teppanyaki grills There are freshly made makis, California rolls and dragon rolls Rolled fried ice cream, which you can garnish with KitKat, Oreo, fresh banana, etc. is a big deal in Thailand Look carefully among all the tempur platters has vegetables and the platters of lacquered duck with pancakes, you will also find margarita pizzas, chicken nuggets and, of course, fries. So more pan-world than pan-Asian, but I dare anyone who is hungry to leave without catering to some of their whims.
If I look oddly jubilant Thinking about eating in Singapore with no limit noodles in a mall, maybe it's because I've spent months watching restaurant prices soar to eerily comical levels. Lunch here costs less than a side of boujie patatas bravas I recently had at a much admired restaurant in Bloomsbury. The KitKat ice cream roll, a new experience for me, is particularly delicious because it slides...
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