Once again, be well fed before you read the following.

There's this place in Springfield that you may have heard of. I'm always on the lookout for good Chinese buffet places, and it has been awhile since I've seen anything remarkable come out of the metropolitan area. Oh, sure, we have takeout. I could carpet my floors with the chinese menus that various visitors and residents have left here after ordering, and walk about all day without spying a copy or the stains left by vomiting that same Chinese, which led me to recarpet the floors with menus in the first place. But bear with me while you swallow that next mouthful of General Tso. Takeout places live and die by the quality they can cram into quarts, and they don't actually need much more than a memorable name to make people forget what an awful experience it was dining there, and hell, anything you can get delivered that isn't pizza for the fourth night in a row will start to sound appetizing even if you've not forgotten what a wretched pile it was the last time you had it.
For a buffet, what matters is a whole different animal of evaluation theory: the badger.
As in, before I lay into badgering this restaurant that is the title of my article, I'll give it whatever merit badgers I can.

A buffet needs a lot of things to stay aloft on the breezes of economy. Clean tables, good location, internal positioning, bathrooms for patrons, smiles...all of which I'm not considering at all, or at least very much. You sit, get food, eat it, go up for another plate and another round. Back in Roanoke, we have no end of good Chinese Buffets, and I'm starting to wonder why the metropolitan area is so lacking (and other metros, too. Richmond for example lacks a good buffet). Let's say that I'm already considering DSB to be well off in all of the non-food areas that I mentioned.
Hell, the food is good, too. What do you expect from a Chinese Buffet? It's there. Rice, fried rice, rice noodles, rice pudding, steamed meat, steamed buns, steamed sweet buns (I swear I'll never see a steamed meat bun again and its sad), pudding and gelatin and steamed cake, crab legs crab rangoons, wanton soup, other soups and goons, chicken that's prepared like duck (it was really chicken though, the bastards), and a wealth of seafood that I would stray from that apparently made the place famous. It has a seating area in the middle that has multiple projectors, a pull-down screen, two disco balls and lofted spot lights, strobes, and large speakers. Reserve for wedding receptions, maybe? Pretty cool on the whole. The food is good, the price is right and reasonable.

But I'm warning you away from this place.
Do not eat there. Quit the idea from your mind. There's other places to go on the same street at all hours it is open. Hell I'll buy you a doughnut or something at the Dunkin's on the corner just please don't go to DSB for food.
No, I'm not trying to hoard it for myself, although I'm not above doing so with food, girls, or video games if the mood so jealously strikes me. No, this time I have a reason and it will make your blood run cold.

Once, there was a group of young men who went to DSB for dinner. They knew the rate was good and downing loads of hot food was a cherished past-time for them and theirs and they went to buffets a lot. They ate and talked and dared each other to eat larger portions or more disgusting looking arrangements of food than the last guy. Their table shipped back more plates per diner than anyone else in the place at the time by a large margin, and they all swelled and swooned at their collective and individual fullness.
Then the check came and the total came to a full 30% more than they had expected, before tax. What the hell? They all jeered.

DSB has a policy that you may take all you wish, but you must eat all you take. If you waste food or try to take any with you, they charge you 30% of the meal once over again as punishment. I have never heard of a place doing this. It is unholy and untoward, and for your own sake you should not eat here. This place lacks good Chinese Buffet, but I'm sure I can find better than this place and their wicked policy. Hell, maybe there's some place in Maryland that I can metro in to.

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