Bewley's Breakfast Buffet (Dublin, Ireland)

"Make sure you have the Irish breakfast," said more than one person who found out I was headed to Ireland. Well they were all wrong. This blog is about greasy food in the Dublin, Ohio area. But given that I was able to sample greasy food in Dublin, Ireland, I thought it important and relevant to our readership.

The breakfast buffet at my hotel was not a continental breakfast. It was in an actual restaurant and was fairly high-end, costing about $16. It just wasn't any good. Apparently the Irish don't do waffles, pancakes, or French toast, which is fine as I'm a bacon-and-eggs guy myself. They also don't do much in the way of fruit. I can't recall ever complaining about every item in a buffet, so this will likely sound whiney, but it's well-deserved. We might as well go by section:

Bread
Scones, soda-bread, and sliced white and wheat breads were available. I enjoyed the scones with a bit of strawberry jam, and the soda bread wasn't bad. The white bread was big and fairly tasteless (probably not as sugary as ours) and not particularly edible for me without jam or an egg on top (more on eggs later). Bread was the best part of the menu.

Meat and Potatoes
The meat and potato station contained bacon, sausage, eggs, and strange stuff like whole mushrooms. I tried the scrambled eggs despite the fact that they were sitting in water. They'd have been edible were they not incredibly salty. The bacon and sausage were what I was looking forward to, but the bacon was quite unlike ours. Looked more like Canadian bacon and very fatty. Not terribly tasty either. The sausage looked like regular links, but were a bit lighter in color than what we typically get. Now, I know that we don't want to know what goes into sausage. I recognize that a lot of nasty stuff goes in there. But there's a pact between us and the sausage-makers. We don't ask how they make it, and they make it taste good. The Irish have no such agreement, however. I think I got a sausage filled with butt. I know some use natural casings. I don't think mine was ever cleaned out in the first place. It tasted like the original filling.

Fortunately, they did offer fried eggs, cooked to order, which proved to be my salvation. Fried egg, on toast, with a shot of fresh-squeezed orange juice (not bad) and some awful coffee became my repertoire. Each day I added something else to try. Something never included the next day.

Fruit
I'm not really sure what some of this stuff was. There was a bowl of apricots in syrup, and another bowl of fruit salad, again in heavy syrup. Finally, there was a bowl of a completely unidentifiable red fruit (in heavy syrup). I tried only the fruit salad, which was too syrupy to eat much of.

Cereal
This should have been safe. The cereal table held half a dozen large open bowls of cereal, including corn flakes, rice krispies, and various other healthy-looking varieties. However, the milk sat out in pitchers, and was just about room temperature by the time it hit my bowl.

Overall, breakfast was an exasperating experience: food, food all around, but nary a bite to eat. I should note that while I didn't particularly enjoy "traditional Irish" fare while I was there... nobody actually eats that stuff anyway. There is good food in Dublin, but you've got to look for it.

Lido's Buffet (Carriage Place - Bethel & Sawmill)

The road to the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet is paved with good intentions.

In an effort to make amends for all the greasy lunches I normally eat, I packed a Healthy Choice frozen dinner last week. Ostensibly, the meal contained beef tips in barbecue sauce, but it tasted more like styrofoam cubes smothered in brown ketchup. Not only was the meal lousy, but I was hungry again 90 minutes later. This experience reinforced my belief that no man should eat anything with the word "Healthy" on the box.

I made amends the next day by visiting an old favorite - Lido's Buffet in Carriage Place. Lido's has been in that location for at least fifteen years, serving up good pizza and fresh salads. There are usually other entrees as well, such as wings, popcorn shrimp, stromboli, or pasta, and good homemade soup.

Lido missed the boat that day, he left the shack
But that was all he missed, he ain't comin' back...

Remember Boz Scaggs' "Lido Shuffle"? No? Then you're quite a bit younger than I am.

I invited a coworker who's a fan of Cici's Pizza. Cici's provides good service and a variety of pies at a bargain price, but to me, their crust always tastes like high school cafeteria pizza. I didn't like high school cafeteria pizza even when I was in high school, so I hoped the extra driving distance to Lido's would pay off.

Lido's didn't let me down. The restaurant looks the same as it always has - dark-green carpet, burgundy wallpaper, and as many booths and tables as they can cram into a strip-mall restaurant. And they need as many seats as they can get, because even on a Wednesday, the place was packed with customers by noon.

We passed through the buffet from right to left, and here's what we found:

* Fresh salad greens (mostly iceberg lettuce) with a variety of toppings and dressings
* Three kinds of pizza: one pepperoni, one pep and sausage, one veggie "half and half" with green peppers and onions on one half and diced tomatoes and onions on the other
* Italian wedding soup
* Chicken wings
* A penne pasta dish with diced chicken in a cheesy white sauce

Lido's pizza offers a well-baked crust of medium thickness and plenty of cheese - a good delivery-quality pie. And it's always fresh, because the crowd depletes the pizza station so fast that the cooks can barely keep up. Somehow they do - about the time the station was down to its last slice, a cook brought fresh pie from the kitchen.

The salad was unremarkable, but all the ingredients were fresh. And isn't that all that's important, given the strictly supporting role salad plays at a pizza buffet?

The penne pasta dish was a pleasant surprise - a little lukewarm, but very tasty. I ate so much of it I didn't have room to try the soup.

My coworker reports that the wings were "much better than BW-3." I've had good wings and lousy wings at BW-3, so take his comment with a grain of salt and a Wet-Nap.

The soda glasses are huge - a nice touch, given that some buffets give you a Dixie cup of Pepsi and look askance at you when you expect three refills. No refills necessary at Lido's, unless sixty ounces of high-fructose corn syrup isn't enough for you.

So why four grease spots instead of five? Two reasons. First, our server never brought us silverware or napkins, which we sourced from the buffet. Other diners were provided with a fork and knife wrapped in a napkin. Like Joe Pesci in GoodFellas, I hate being on the "pay no mind" list. Second, with drink and tip, the price is dangerously close to $10/person. Lido's once encouraged regulars to return by providing "$1 off" coupons, good for your next visit. Apparently they've stopped that - unless our coupons were off someplace with our silverware.

Lido be runnin' havin' great big fun
'Til he got the note...

This is the end of an era for me, because for years, I've never been without a Lido's coupon in my wallet. The food's still good, so I'll go back to Lido's - but probably not as often as I once did. Enjoy the buffet, but don't expect much change back from a ten-dollar bill.

E Chen's (Karric Square/Frantz Road)

The thought occurred to me, as I was enjoying my second plate of Asian lardy goodness at E Chen's, that food is the only substance nearly everyone abuses. We look down our noses at crack addicts and dumpster-diving winos, but we all like to gorge ourselves at lunch from time to time, especially if we've had a bad day.

And I'd had the kind of morning at work that would drive a man to go drink until he pukes up his pancreas, or smoke green plants until Kid Rock lyrics sound profound. Except that a responsible head-of-household is supposed to be beyond that sort of thing...ahem. So I decided to escape the blues by visiting E Chen's all-you-can-eat Asian buffet in Karric Square. At least I called a friend to join me. They say if you gorge alone, it's an indication that you have a problem.

I've worked in Dublin since 2005, and I have found no better Asian buffet in the Northwest area than E Chen's. The staff is friendly and efficient. The restaurant is clean, well-decorated, and large, and by request, you can be seated in a back room where ESPN is shown on two giant projection televisions.

The buffet consists of four large serving stations under a sky-blue painted ceiling. It gleams like a leprechaun's pot of gold, or Chad Johnson's grille. The stations are thoughtfully spaced, so there's plenty of room to serve yourself without jostling and bumping other patrons, even at the height of lunch hour. Which is a crucial consideration, given the ample dimensions of many buffet regulars.

As for the food:
* The hot and sour soup was hot. Sour, too.
* The spring rolls were terrific.
* The General Tso's chicken was lean and fresh. Some buffets use such fatty chicken that you suspect them of battering globs of chicken fat and passing them off - not E Chen's. General Tso wouldn't stand for that, and neither should you.
* The Mala string beans were also fresh - bright green and resilient to the touch, not the sad, wrinkly, dark-green leftovers I've had elsewhere. I chose them mainly to kid myself that I was eating healthy.
* I'm sorry I didn't note the official name of the pulled-pork-and-onions dish, but it's always available, and it's my favorite. Lean pork in a sweet and slightly spicy brown sauce with fresh onions. Great stuff.
* There's a combo dish of chopped link sausage, peppers, and onions that was also very good. Onions are a great defense mechanism against demanding coworkers.
* There was pizza, but I didn't try it, just as I wouldn't try Kung Pao if they served it at Pizza Hut.
* There was sushi, but I'm an uncultured Midwesterner who can't bring himself to eat raw fish. I also have a shellfish allergy that causes me to, well, die. My dining buddy said the sushi was excellent.
* There were tasty-looking brownies and cakes and soft-serve ice cream for dessert, but after two plates of entrees and a bowl of soup, I couldn't eat another bite. I was lucky I could move without the aid of a Hoveround.
* The staff did a fine job of replenishing the serving trays. I never saw one less than 1/4 full.

Even with a $2 tip, the check was under $9. A little more than I like to spend at lunch, but I knew no simple sandwich could bring me out of my work-induced doldrums like E Chen's - a virtual opium den of Asian culinary goodness in unlimited quantities.