Bad For You: Origus Pizza Buffet

In TheBeijinger.com forums, there’s a thread with the comment: “The only thing more disgusting than the food at Origus is watching fat little kids wolf down insane portions.”

That fat kid was me. The year was 1985. It was my birthday party, I was buzzing on food additives and very, very happy. That was the last time I saw chicken nuggets, fish sticks, plastic pizza, ice cream and beakers of fizzy drinks on the same table. Until now.

With its 40 branches around Beijing, Origus is like the children’s birthday party that never ends … only with beer. You can fill your face daily with the sort of reckless abandon your mum thought prudent to permit just once a year.

The food is … generously seasoned. And sweet. Sweetest of all is the pizza. Even their meat feast equivalent, peculiarly named “Western Scenery,” tasted like cake. On a scale of “real” to “processed,” it’s somewhere down near bubble gum.

Almost everything else is deep-fried, nugget-shaped and drying out under lamps. The desserts are utterly unfathomable, like a wedge of something yellow with the texture of bicycle tire, and another thing with olive slices on top. But they do have some real food: hot wings, spicy chicken breast, spaghetti. And it’s possible to assemble a passable salad of cherry tomatoes, hard-boiled egg, corn and dill pickle. Combine that with lots of beer and half-decent egg tarts, and your RMB 49 seems an OK deal. The best bit is serving yourself ice cream from the soft-serve machine. For a seven-year-old fatty having the time of his life, that would have been the biggest treat of all.