With hundreds of dishes, Café Central An Đông restaurant never disappoints its loyal clientele who come back year after year for its delicious buffet, fresh seafood, and live cooking stations. Mỹ Duyên reports. 

What could go wrong with the largest buffet restaurant in HCM City? Very little, according to thousands of satisfied customers.

With 420 seats, including indoor and outdoors, and fabulous flavours from around the world, Café Central An Đông in the Windsor Plaza Hotel is an ideal destination for families and large groups.

Though it is located a bit far from downtown in District 5, formerly known as Great Market or Chinatown, it never fails to attract a large number of visitors thanks to its variety of dishes and live cooking demonstrations.

Besides the quality of its food, the restaurant is known for its reasonable prices and dedicated service.

An impressive Chinese-style interior greets you at the main entrance, while the live cooking stations welcome guests with dozens of hot dishes on your left and an array of mouthwatering desserts on your right.

With such a large dining space, including private areas, diners can be choosy about where they want to sit. 

In the restaurant’s central area, bowls of cooked fresh seafood on ice and drink counters surprised my eight-year-old twins, who declared it a “heaven for seafood”.   

With such a vast array of dishes, my kids were a bit overwhelmed with the buffet’s offerings. Our strategy was to roam the area first to look at everything and then return to our starting point to choose the most enticing dishes.

For lunch, there are around 100 dishes, and for dinner, at least 150. Aside from a wide selection of Chinese, Vietnamese, other Asian and international favourites, on offer is also a wide array of live seafood such as tiger prawns, oysters, mud crab cooked to order; sizzling roasted US beef, a sushi bar and a full salad bar. 

As lovers of Japanese food, our first choice was the sushi bar. My children picked up rice rolls, prawn tempura (their favourite), and chawanmushi (steamed egg) while I chose sashimi items.

At the long buffet table, I decided to skip the hot dishes, despite the wide variety, which included Vietnamese steamed rice cakes, Huế-style beef vermicelli or Vietnamese beef noodle, stir-fried seafood noodle, clams steamed with lemongrass, sea snails sautéed with coconut milk, prawns sautéed with onion, Chinese stir-fried rice, pork ribs sautéed with sour and sweet sauce, and many more.