PHOTOS
Lisa Sokolowski
Buffets are often not as good as you expect them to be. You build them up in your mind, thinking that for one flat rate you can fill yourself with food. You don't have to decide what to order since you can have a little of everything, and, if you don't like one food, you can leave it on your plate and try another.
When you get there, though, it's totally different. The food is cold; there is only so much lumpy mashed potato you can stomach; and getting stuffed just doesn't have that much appeal.
And yet, the draw of "all you can eat" is a lighthouse for foodies, myself included. When I heard that the new Timbers Buffet was open in Mohegan Sun at Pocono Downs, I hardly wasted any time getting there.
The price of the buffet is cheap - $7.99 for breakfast; $10.99 for lunch; $14.99 for dinner - but the food sure isn't.
I started with the Italian station, which was a circle station in the center of the buffet. For the sake of reviewing it appropriately, I piled a little bit of everything from the station onto my plate.
I walked back to where I was eating with a trio, but I was only greeted by two of my companions. No worries, I thought, as I dove into my fettuccine bolognaise and its savory chunks of meat. I had already given a thumbs up to the cheese tortellini and a thumbs down to the stuffed shells when I started to get concerned: Where was my grandma? I wrote off the idea that she had run off to the slots and didn't tell us, but I couldn't shake the idea that she was lost.
My mom, a single-person search party, found her by the glow of the meat carving station.
"I got lost," my grandma said, later noting that the circular buffet made her dizzy.
With her at the table, we started talking about soups - the only hot food item at the buffet. Not that everything else was meant to be chilled, but many diners were leaving the tops off, causing the heat to escape. The soups (and coffee), however, were piping hot. The clam chowder, packed with clams, was a favorite, although I much preferred the broccoli and cheese soup.
What I really liked, though, was that each station had some form of cooking. There was stir fry at one, pierogies at another, and the meat carving station (which had "tender" beef, according to my mom) would actually grill your cut if you wanted it cooked more.
There was pizza with an incredibly crunchy crust cut into small squares, which are a little hard to tear. The server helped me out, assuring me that older women try to take a piece and end up flipping one half of the pizza onto the other. So, if you see ladies making a beeline there, my advice is to cut them off.
Of course, we had to try the dessert, which, against traditional buffet staples, didn't have soft serve ice cream. There was hard ice cream though, served generously by a very chipper man who didn't blink at my plate full of sweets (as noted above, I had to try it all for this story). The mint chocolate cake was the talk of the table, as was what a Timbers frequenter called "brownie soup" (a slop of thick brownie requiring a glass of milk - or vanilla ice cream). There was rice and chocolate pudding, but surprisingly, there were mini funnel cakes, which should be eaten before the brownie soup if you want to taste any sweetness from the powdered sugar.
Even if you don't win at the casino, you're sure to win at the buffet.