Critic's Review
Jin Sha quietly opened; it you don't work in the area or hang out at the library there's no reason to go by this place. Parking used to be cheaper in this part of town, but now it's up to $1.50/hour; figure that the meter will eat at least 1 coin, so it's going to cost you over $1 for lunch parking.
The place is pretty small; a midget compared to the Shinju and Kyojin buffets, at a similar price ($11.95 for the buffet, plus drink). They have no online presence that I could find, so I went in without knowing about their regular menu. I thought it was just a buffet; but they're a chinese/japanese restaurant with a lunch buffet option.
The "host" tried to seat me at a table right in front of the buffet in an empty dining room, but I pointed to a window seat. He tried to seat every other person who came in at the same table, apparently never getting it that nobody wanted to sit in the middle of an empty room by a buffet.
The "buffet" consists of 3 tables, one "Japanese", which is basically one plate od sushi and 3 plates of rolls, a hot chinese buffet, and a salad/dessert bar.
It looked pretty lame, but I'd already laid out for parking and I was committed to try it out. It's a bit awkward as there are a number of servers and it's not clear if it's a collective thing or if you have 1 specific person. I got an iced tea; they don't have Splenda or even blue; just white or pink.
I headed over to the buffet.
Spare ribs, "Mongolian" Beef, a chicken wing and "mixed seafood". The beef was good, except it had no scallions, which of course is the key ingredient in Mongolian beef, so it was really something else. The spare ribs were messy and tough; chinese ribs are always tough. The chicken wing was fine, but the seafood mixture wasn't so good. I guess the rings were from big squids, but they were just rubbery.
On to the Sushi Table.
I'm not big on rolls, and they didn't have much choice here. California rolls, vegetable rolls, spicy tuna. They had 4 pieces of sushi out; if you wanted to load up on sushi at this place you'd have to spend a long time getting a couple of pieces at a time. I grabbed a salmon and tuna and ripped off the fish for the sashami. Alas, it wasn't sashimi quality.
The salad bar was a big tub of iceberg lettuce with some stuff in it and some of that icky ginger dressing in a tub along with a "raw" bar with cooked shrimp and raw mussels. The mussel scared me and I didn't eat it. The shrimp were undercooked, unbrined and not deveined. How hard is it to steam or boil some shrimp?
I was still hungry, so I went back to the hot food bar and loaded up a plate.
The pot sticker was burnt to the consistency of a fortune cookie and the calamari rings were spit-out material. The chicken with cashews would have been good if there was more chicken, but it was mostly carrot cubes and celery. Cutting back on ingredients in their first week. The green beens were nice and crunchy and the chicken part of the chicken and broccoli was good; the broccoli badly overcooked.
The "dessert" bar has cream puffs and some sort of cake. Nothing of interest to me.
With me and one other dude in the dining room, I waited at least 5 minutes to get someone's attention to bring my check. $14.50 is too much for this buffet. Way too much. For $11.95, this buffet is a weak subset of the "other" buffets: Shinju, Golden Dragon and Kyojin are all far superior.
Given that they have a regular chinese and sushi lunch menu, it makes no sense to pay for this buffet. I predict that it will either disappear or the price will be drastically lowered; $9.95 would be a better price for this, including a drink. Maybe lose the sushi and make it $8.95. They were putting out like 2 spoonfuls of stuff at a time into the buffet; they're just not going to get enough people to pay this price to make a go of it.
I was lucky enough to have tried Gourmet Bistro. It was great, although a little on the high-end side perhaps for the area.