please sir, can i have some more?

Last weekend we were very hungry after carrying lots of wood but we couldn’t decide what to eat. We had vouchers for the new Harlequin restaurant at Springfield Quay so thought we'd give it a go.

I find the Quay quite a strange place. It's all chain restaurants, crappy retail park buildings which turns its back on both the river and Paisley Road West. They are currently completing a strange multi storey car park thing at the corner beside the cinema, which looks pretty hideous and completely blocks off any chance to allow pedestrians to wander down from Paisley Road West and the surrounding area. This lack of pedestrian access results in the Quay being for cars only, and as anyone who has visited it during a busy time knows, that can make it a bit of a nightmare. Fortunately that night it was pretty quiet and it only took us three circuits to find a parking space.

As we were about to enter the Harlequin place, we noticed a sign for another restaurant upstairs - called the Panda Buffet and offering an all you can eat deal for £9.99. This we thought was an excellent idea as we both felt like having a good mix of starters and on second thoughts, didn't really fancy spicy food.

Upstairs, the restaurant was reasonably spacious and the staff were very friendly. Even in the face of some rather rude customers - especially the girl’s football team, who made fun of the waitress’s accent when she brought a normal coke instead of full fat. The restaurant is spit into two with one area for the people having proper food off the menu, and another for the plebs like us, looking to stuff our faces from the buffet’s selection of classic Chinese cuisine.

On this night though I was happy to be a plebe and was rather excited by the concept of all you can eat. I didn't even sit down before heading for the grub. All looked very tasty and thankfully looked to be pretty well protected from rouge customer sneezes. We ladled up our plates with a mix of starters (chicken for me, veggies for ann) and headed back to the table.

The girl’s football team were not the most athletic looking bunch in the world, particularly one girl who had parked her chair in the aisle completely blocking our way. Rather than apologise, or indeed move, she just stared at us until we took the much longer route around their two tables to our seats. It was interesting to note that while most of her team were eating an assortment of tasty looking Chinese dishes - she was eating a big plate of chips. I think she must be the goalie.

After the meal we wandered over to pay and had a chat with the extremely friendly owner. He told us, the restaurant had only opened a couple of weeks ago and that so far things were going well. We told him we were pretty stuffed and this delighted him. We were getting on so well, I toyed with the idea of advising him that his ice-cream sucked, being mainly ice and very little cream. But I decided that maybe the machine had malfunctioned and we will give it the benefit of the doubt and will see if it’s tastier next time.