Zorro's Buffet on Thanksgiving in 2008 did not make for a good Thanksgiving. No carved turkey, with all the fixin's. Among other shortcomings.
When Zorro's Buffet first opened I opined enthusiastically about it, because I thought it was good, on a par with buffets I've been a pig at in Las Vegas and Reno and elsewhere.
Subsequent visits were on a par with the first, til that Thanksgiving turkey debacle ended my visits to Zorro's Buffet.
Til today.
A short while ago a new Zorro's Buffet opened close to where I live, in Hurst, in the Northeast Mall complex.
Today was fellow former Pacific Northwesterner, Big Ed's, 39th birthday, give or take a year or two. I asked Big Ed if he wanted to go to the new Zorro's Buffet for his birthday. The answer was in the affirmative.
I'd not been to any sort of buffet type deal since I was in Arizona and we went to the Sweet Tomatoes in Ahwatukee. That was a really good buffet experience.
The buffet experience, today, at the new Zorro's Buffet in Hurst, was not a good buffet experience.
The new restaurant looks nice, big and open. Clean. Cool looking cement floor. Several buffet stations.
The first problem is the Zorro's Buffet plate has been shrunk to dessert plate size. A BBQ beef rib overwhelmed the plate.
Another problem was the food was not tasty. For instance, the aforementioned BBQ beef rib did not taste even remotely BBQed.
The only protein that tasted good was a grilled fish of some unknown variety. There was fried, grilled and roasted chicken, none of which seemed to be seasoned or tasty.
There were no fresh yeast rolls like I'd learned to like at the original Zorro's.
The prepared salads were blah.
There were slabs of some sort of steak product covered with what might have been intended to be BBQ sauce, but which was pretty much just a slab of tasteless, tough leather.
Blindfolded I would not have guessed what the chile rellenos were. All I tasted was egg.
The chicken flautas were like hard, flavorless cigars. The chicken enchiladas were like the hard, flavorless chicken flautas, only with a sauce poured on top.
The original Zorro's did dessert well. Simple, with few selections, all of which seemed fresh and made on the premises.
The desserts at the Hurst Zorro's were not fresh, did not seem as if they could possibly have been made on the premises, all had that previously frozen, mass-produced look. Like the awful cherry cobbler with little evidence of cherries and a crust that might be a new construction product. The peach pie was not peachy.
And the ice cream. At the original Zorro's you could scoop up the ice cream yourself and put it on the cobbler. At the Hurst Zorro's an employee scoops the ice cream for you. A golf ball size scoop.
I don't know what has happened with Zorro's Buffet. Did the original owner sell out? I think the cost cutting measures and the quality reduction portend for a very short life for Zorro's Buffet in Hurst.
Too bad.
The original Zorro's Buffet was really good. Originally.
2 comments:
If I'm not mistaken, this outfit belongs to the same people who opened the Fire Pit in the former Luby's location in Bedford. The Fire Pit was a pit; the food was awful; the people there didn't care about what they were doing, and the place was overall - as you said - a dud. I don't think the Fire Pit made it 6 months before the doors closed. I never investigated Zorro's believing it would be just as bad as the fire pit. I wrote quite a bit about the place on trip advisor - none of it was flattering, but was the truth.
It's no longer open anymore. Did not last long.
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