Atlantic Buffet - Bloomington, MN

We had a great Mongolian place back in our hometown, so we have been trying to find an equally palatable Mongolian restaurant. This wasn’t it. It was a Mongolian and Sushi place (mixing nationalities). We pulled up and saw a lot of ginormous white trash people coming out. Based on other restaurants I’ve been to, when you see that, just turn around and go someplace else. We got seated right away, which is always bad on a Friday night. Gerd went and grabbed some appetizer-y food while I hopped in the Mongolian line.

The selection at the Mongolian station was about 4 veggies and 4 meats. You also got to choose between like 6 sauces (spelled souces on their signs). One guy was working the grill, extremely slowly, so it took me more than 10 minutes to get to the front of the line. Meanwhile, Gerd has gotten up, gotten more food, and stopped over at least twice to harass me about waiting so long.

When I made it back to eat, the food was well below average with stringy meat pieces. I finished up what I could and headed to the buffet portion. I’m not a fan of Chinese food buffets, so I’m not sure why I thought this one might be different, but it wasn’t. The food was pretty bad. Fortunately, Gerd had already sampled a ton of things while I was standing in line, so she saved me some horrifying food testing.

The best thing on the buffet was the sesame chicken (which had ZERO sesame seeds on it). The next best thing was the tap water they brought to our table.

As we were eating, we were treated to a giant woman getting dizzy and calling 911. The fire and ambulance folks showed up and carried her out. I hope she’s ok, but the hilarious part was that people were still coming in and being seated. It’s kind of a rule of thumb - if there’s an ambulance out front of a restaurant, I pick a different place.


Top 5 Things
1. Fun to try sushi, since you don’t feel bad about throwing the gross ones away with everything else that was gross
2. Millions of servers cleaning tables
3. Ice cream was ok
4. Cream cheese puffs were ok for one out of two of us
5. It’s possible to NOT overeat here, because you can’t find anything worth filling up on

Bottom 5 Things
1. Most of the food was really awful
2. The Mongolian selection was tiny
3. I waited more than 10 minutes to have my Mongolian Food cooked
4. People keeling over while you eat
5. You can’t get INTO the parking lot. It’s a maze.

atlanticbuffet.com