Every couple of months, my eating pal (Jon) and I show up at the Silver Streams evening buffet like two junkies in need of a hit. The urge usually culminates around the middle of the month - we both start thinking about grease, salt, MSG, and red food colouring number 14. Once those sugar-plums begin dancing in our heads, we have no choice but to quickly set about deciding which night would be best to gorge on Chinese food. It's kind of like our cycles have synced; instead of getting bitchy and bleeding at the same time, we get the sudden urge to eat.

Having gone through the wait-here-to-be-seated routine a hundred times before, we now walk straight into the dining room, toss a drink order as we pass the waittress, select a table, and set about the most important task: filling our plates. In retrospect, it seems as though we act like we're the owners of the joint. In my mind, I've eaten so much of their stuff, I ought to be.

The first of many.

We've discovered that arriving no later than 6:30 is the prime time to dig into their buffet. Most people arrive by 5:00, and that usually results in an instant rush of hungry folks to the buffet. That's crap - I don't want to wait to get food. I'm all about minimizing the delay in getting food from the buffet to my face (hence my disregard of the "wait here to be seated" sign). Arriving around this time ensures the first bit of the rush is over, and gives time for the staff to replenish the steam trays.

To acheive this "must eat now" objective, we've had to develop a number of strategies to maximize our food intake and minimize the number of trips to and from our table. Despite the tactical variety in our arsenal, however, our end process remains largely the same. It follows as such:

1. Heap as much food on your plate as you can.
2. Eat as many plates of food as you can (see step 1).
3. Eat as many bowls of won ton soup as you can.
4. Eat as much ice cream as you can.
5. Eat quickly, so that your mouth is always one step ahead of your feeling of fullness.
6. Eat through the pain.

Jon shows us how it's done.

The buffet itself is reasonable size. They feature most of the typical North-American-Chinese food one would expect to see, and that quenches our need for grease and salt quite well. The variety of food has also changed somewhat in the last few years; they've begun adding things like curry potatos, and often have another different dish available each time we visit. While the food is only pretty good as far as Canadian-Chinese goes, there's a lot of it - which is the entire point of a buffet, and indeed this blog.

One thing I dislike about their buffet is the placement of their red sauce pot. Hell, their red sauce kind of sucks to begin with, but its placement is an even bigger problem. They put it right at the beginning of the buffet, next to the plates. Now, any eater knows that sauce is added to food once the food has been procured. This results in a lot of "excuse me"-s, "sorry, just gettin' some sauce"-s, "hey, can you put some of that on my plate"-s, and a variety of other polite utterances as people butt in line while trying to get the much-sought and pretty mediocre red sauce. Bad form.

Conversely, as you travel along the buffet, piling food on your plate and strategizing your approach to the sauce pot as you go, you'll come across a hot tray of onion rings. I was completely surprised when I first set eyes on them. Just like finding a diamond among coal, or getting a flash of side-boob in the middle of a documentary, these onion rings surprise, delight, and keep me coming back for more. Kudos.

Plate five is a smidge smaller than his four siblings.

After five or so trips to the buffet, it becomes time for the ice cream course. This is the only buffet around Charlottetown that, as far as I know, has ice cream. They frequently change the types of ice cream available, but they always land on a perfect combination; when each type is smooshed together with the crushed remains of my fortune cookie, the end result is a bowl of sweet excellence and joy. Overall, the ice cream is a nice touch; it serves as a creamy mortar which fills the cracks between the Chinese bricks in my stomach.

After all is said and eaten, we tend to follow our gastrol indulgence with our coping-with-the-pain strategy:

1. Drink loads of beer to help push things along.
2. Rent a grotesque horror film and equate our gut-pain to the gut-pain happening on-screen. Woot, empathy.
3. Leave the fan on and a candle lit in the bathroom to carry away the "bad spirits."

Overall, the Silver Streams buffet is pretty darn alright. The food isn't necessarily as good as other Chinese food places around town, but it certainly has the quantity. That is, after all, what really matters.

Quantity: 8/10
Quality: 5.5/10