We had gone to the Golden Koi Chinese Buffet for the first time a few months prior. Maybe it was a year ago. It’s hard to keep track. It was the kind of day when we didn’t have any real lunch plan, and we were simply driving down Battleground when we saw it there. “Ah,” we thought, “Chinese food could be good.” And so we went in, and our fates were sealed.
From the outside, the Golden Koi looks like a typical restaurant, a small, rectangular building, painted red. Its relatively new, I think—or at least recently reopened. Not much parking, but that’s to be expected from someplace on busy, crowded, overdeveloped Battleground Avenue. Paintings of Koi fish border the roof.
Inside, though, well, inside is something else. Golden Koi is one of the most depressing places I’ve ever been, but not in a soul-wrenching Holocaust Museum kind of way. Rather, the malaise of the place is mixed with a feeling of dull, enveloping comfort. You don’t notice it at first, but it sinks over you slowly. It’s like sitting in a room where the light is slowly fading—it’s a blanket of sadness.
The dining area is a big open space, with lots of unremarkable tables and chairs. The ceiling seems to hang just a foot or maybe even a few inches too low, and it hangs over you like a storm cloud. The place is lit by a bunch of big fluorescent ceiling lights, the kind used in basement corridors or big box stores, but only half seem to be working, and even those are sickly and dull, seemingly ready to putter off at any moment. The floor and walls are beige or grey, or some other non-color. There are a few of those big light-up pictures of waterfalls and Chinese river villages, like you always see in Chinese restaurants, but their backlights are turned off. Other parts of the wall are mirrored, so that you can gaze at the dead emptiness in your own eyes as you eat. Sound is kind of dissipated throughout the space, so you don’t hear talking or movement or even eating, just a thick, inescapable hum.
The closest approximation to the dining room I can think of is a dingy nursing home—only without the old people smell and twice the sense of impending death. Or maybe a crowded emergency care clinic, where everyone—even the staff—is afflicted with a particularly debilitating flu. It’s like eating Chinese food in Purgatory.
The wait staff doesn’t help. Most of the waitresses have a defeated look—I imagine they work at Golden Koi as some sort of slavery they sold themselves into to escape having to work at seedy Hong Kong brothels. One woman, the owner I guess, is older and usually behind the register, constantly complaining about not getting enough business and promising that the restaurant will soon close. But it never does.
The actual buffet is located in a room separate from the dining room, awkwardly separated by an area holding the cash register, the doors, and the waitress’s station. The room holding the buffet is a sick yellowy color, and there is no decoration. At the back of the room is a counter area, like a take-out counter you see at lots of Chinese express kinds of places, that is completely abandoned. The serving area behind the counter is dark. Above it are pictures of various Chinese dishes, but all are faded and dusty. The impression given by the area is decidedly post-apocalyptic.
To be fair, the food is pretty good. Or at least ok. There are some teriyaki chicken sticks which are quite good despite being a weird bright red color that doesn’t exist in nature. And there’s a big bowl of a sauce—it’s like a soy sauce with chunks of garlic and onion in it—that’s actually really good. I particularly like putting it on the fried shrimp. Most of the dishes are, if nothing else, as good as any other Chinese buffet I’ve been to. Still, it’s not quite enough to compensate for the crushing weight of the world sadness that comes with the Golden Koi experience.
And yet, Jonathan and I have eaten lunch at Golden Koi at least four times. We go months without thinking about it, then out of nowhere, we’ll both suddenly feel the need to go. We may not even want to—we try to get out of it by suggesting other places, but as soon as it’s mentioned, we know there is no choice and that nothing else will really satisfy.
So we did end up going a few weeks ago. Pulling up, Jonathan pointed out (accurately) that even the painted koi on the outside of the restaurant look dismayed. We proceeded regardless. Inside, it was the typical Golden Koi experience. Dull sadness, unsmiling patrons, soul-crushed waitstaff, tasty fried shrimp, a feeling of encroaching death.
When we went to check-out, a different girl was working the register. She was younger than the usual, but looked equally sad and broken. As we paid, she chatted with us about how stressed she was because the restaurant was so busy (it was about half-full), and how hot it was outside. Normally, an interaction like that is generally pleasant, but at Golden Koi it was sinister and suspicious. There was a nervousness to the girl’s speaking and a desperation in her eyes, like she was a hostage with a gun at her back trying to act normal. Leaving the restaurant, I quickly checked our receipts to see if she had scrawled “please help me” somewhere on the back.
Leaving, we wondered what kept bringing us back to Golden Koi. At first we blamed this odd compulsion on something addictive in the food, but I don’t think it’s that—I think its something deeper, and more insidious. Perhaps it’s almost a catharsis—after facing a lunch at Golden Koi, nothing else seems so bad—colors seem brighter, the air is fresher, and no matter what your problems are, at least you’re not there anymore. Or maybe Golden Koi is some wicked thing, a particularly banal evil that has sunk its claws into us, and lures us back again and again, until we succumb to it and face a hopeless future of sesame chicken and gloom.
God help us.
God help us all.
