An All-You-Can-Eat Time Machine
The country buffet is a very specific genre of restaurant, with origins in the cafeterias and meat-and-threes of the South. It is defined by its all-you-can-eat business model and by its steam-table offerings, which are likely to include fried chicken and sides such as collards, candied yams, and potatoes with gravy. A country buffet is often found in a strip mall, is generally decorated for utility more than for charm, and almost always has a carpeted dining room. This last feature exists for the same reason that the country buffet’s fixed price generally includes a carve-out for senior discounts: its most devoted customers are old, and the carpet’s friction helps keep unsteady feet anchored to the ground. David Yun, Yong Min Kim, and Steve Choi, the trio of restaurateurs behind the Manhattan restaurants Kisa and C as in Charlie, hail from the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. Many of the buffets in the area were run by Korean immigrants, and the three grew up eating and working in them. Good Time Country Buffet, which they opened in September in the East Village, is a monument to nostalgia: in its every obsessive detail it’s a hoary old Georgia country buffet that’s been around for decades, even though it’s barely been there a month.
The restaurateurs’ obsessiveness seems to be a habit. Their most recent establishment, Kisa, an homage to the quick-service canteens that serve South Korea’s taxi-drivers, is a feat of uncannily precise world-building that extends even beyond the restaurant’s walls: on the block outside, you can spot stickers written in Korean adhered to lampposts and scaffold walls, advertising fake taxi companies with Kisa’s address. For Good Time, they’ve upped the level of commitment even more, going so far as to fly the former owner of a Georgia buffet up to New York to vet the details. The result, in both its grace notes and its gestalt, freakishly summons the placeless, timeless, sunless anti-aesthetics of a turn-of-the-millennium strip-mall buffet. I mean this as a compliment, and I know the proprietors will take it as one: this restaurant is so, so spectacularly ugly, in the most honest and love-filled and organic-feeling way. It’s a monochromatic symphony of browns and tans: the laminate tabletops, the melamine plateware, the wood panelling, the rosettes that dot hideous moss-green carpeting. Even the climbing-vine wallpaper is yellowed, as if gradually discolored by the cigarettes of a thousand ancient Sundays.
Entering the slim space, you’ll pass a community bulletin board covered in flyers, most of which are for fake homespun businesses fronted by Good Time’s real-life friends and colleagues: piano lessons from their general manager, graphic design from their architect. A host will direct you into a tidy dining room lined with booths and tables. You sit. You confirm with a server your intent to eat. Then you head to the buffet, which occupies a fluorescent-lit area at the back of the space, decorated with faux greenery and a bricolage of framed pictures and cheesy inspirational art. As at any decent country buffet, dinner is unlimited. (It runs a truly humane $26.99, with discounts for seniors and kids, of course.) The centerpiece and signature dish is fried chicken, which is unreservedly and objectively excellent, with a thin, crackly batter and beautifully seasoned meat. There are plenty of other options beneath the sneeze guards as well, most of more unremarkable quality: ovoid meatballs of Salisbury steak in a salty gravy, Buffalo wings in a tangy-hot sauce, and all the usual sides and trimmings of a Southern-style feast. (Standouts included the candied yams, sunny in both color and flavor, and soupy braised collards studded with little pink buttons of ham.) The buffet’s cold table is largely given over to a standard salad bar—you can’t really mess up lovely hunks of iceberg lettuce in a serving bin, or a little bucket of cherry tomatoes, though neither can you give them much of a glow-up. There’s tuna salad, lightly dressed canned corn, and a mountain of egg salad, briskly mustardy and surprisingly nice.
I’m a buffet lover through and through; there’s something about the combination of unfettered abundance, pick-and-mixery, and culinary economies of scale that really tickles something primal for me. New York, in recent decades, has had its share of all-you-can-eat joints, but they’ve mostly been of the table-service variety. The city’s unlimited-buffet scene—lunchtime spreads at Indian restaurants, a handful of sprawling Chinese banquets—was never terribly robust, and it became even less so during the years of the pandemic and its attendant hygiene concerns. I know I’m not the only person who despaired that I might never again do the awkward “Do I reuse my plate or get a new one . . . ?” shuffle without crossing state lines into more buffet-friendly territory. (N.B.: Always get a new plate.)
Much of the thrill of Good Time is just the familiar pleasures of the format. The restaurant offers more or less the same items every day, though there are plans to add a daily rotating menu—fried fish, sloppy joes—as is customary at buffets down South. The laminated table cards, too, hint at a more robust future: on one side is a drink menu (sweet tea, naturally, comes in pebbled-plastic tumblers), on the other a list of ice-cream sundaes, half obscured by a piece of tape that reads “coming soon.” For now, meals end where they began, at the buffet: skip the banana pudding, which is overly gluey and tastes mostly of cornstarch, and go instead for a scoop of gooey chocolate brownie or a tart dollop of fruit cobbler.
In the restaurant’s first few weeks, a line for tables stretched down the block, but waits are more manageable now. Sundays still tend to draw a bigger crowd. In this heathen city, it’s unlikely that customers are spilling in after church, as many do at more southerly establishments, but there’s something about Good Time that tugs on that Sunday-lunch cord, nevertheless. One evening, I dropped in for dinner with a friend whom the restaurant might as well have been created for, personally, in some lab; she’s of the same micro-generation as the owners, she also grew up near Atlanta, and she also adores a buffet on a deep emotional level. She spent our meal in a state of wonderment over Good Time’s carefully conjured atmosphere. “This has got to be an actual 95.5 The Beat playlist,” she said, referring to an early-two-thousands hip-hop radio station in Atlanta, as “Yeah!,” by Usher, cross-faded on the sound system into Nelly’s “Dilemma.”
Helen, Help Me!
E-mail your questions about dining, eating, and anything food-related, and Helen may respond in a future newsletter.
A simulacrum this faithful cannot be easily placed along the spectrum of “good” and “bad” by which we tend to assess restaurants. It might even break beyond the boundaries of “restaurant” and start creeping—campily, postmodernishly—toward art. Take the meat loaf, for example, which was very bad: crumbly briquettes of beef with a desultory ketchup glaze. But, as part of a meticulous reconstruction of a type of eatery known for mediocre food, does its badness actually count as a mark of success? Is the flat and burnt-edged corn bread a culinary error, or a flawless re-creation? I kept thinking about “Piccadilly Community Centre,” a 2011 piece by the artist Christoph Büchel, which involved entirely retrofitting the London location of Hauser & Wirth into a working community space, complete with linoleum-tiled floors, baking lessons, and a thrift store. Its eleven-week run so thoroughly fooled so many visitors, including many neighbors who delightedly availed themselves of its services, that—despite the project’s arguable artistic success—it left behind concerns that people had been used as unwitting props in someone else’s joke.
What saves Good Time from this sort of sour misunderstanding is that it isn’t really trying to “say” anything, except that the owners of the restaurant really love buffets. Büchel was a tourist in the world he built; Yun, Kim, and Choi are bona-fide inhabitants of theirs. Any unknowing diners who step in with zero context might wonder how, exactly, such a dated room has managed to survive for so long in a prime East Village location, but they won’t leave feeling hoodwinked. They’ll pay a decent price for decent food, smiling service, a fun soundtrack. How could they feel anything but happy? On one of my visits, I observed a pair of older ladies—the precise clientele for whom the dining room’s industrial carpeting had been laid—at a nearby table. It had dawned on them that they were in a restaurant that was referencing other restaurants—that they were, in effect, dining inside quotation marks. “Oh, but what’s the difference!” one of them exclaimed, reaching for another golden chicken thigh. We were all birds pecking at Zeuxis’ deceptively lifelike painted grapes, though in this case we were eating mashed potatoes, and the mashed potatoes were fluffy and gravy-lashed and real. ♦
