Restaurant Review

COSMO World Buffet

Liverpool ONE, 8A Manesty’s Lane, L1 3DL

By Robin Brown | Buffet| £ |

Enter COSMO World Buffet on a Friday night and the first thing you notice is the noise. Clanking tureen lids and, every 15 minutes like an industrial cuckoo clock, cutlery dumped into a bin like scrap metal.

The ambience is less restaurant, more airport. Once you’re seated, you have 90 minutes – you feel compelled to work fast, despite the reasonable pricing (£17–23 for adults; £3 for kids; free on your birthday if you bring three friends). The food is largely Asian in origin, including a sushi station, curries and Chinese dishes. From a hot plate you can order burgers, steaks and seafood; a pizza chef spins dough and there’s a carvery with a mercilessly roasted gammon and Yorkshire puds if that other stuff sounds too adventurous.

I enter warily with a plate and inspect what’s on offer. A tray of mini potato waffles, looking like tiny golden trampolines, sweats under heat lamps among the starters, which can generously be described as a symphony of beige. Among deep-fried wares that speak of chest freezers and large sacks and the nugget-adjacent options there is real chicken breast, which feels like a quiet triumph, and some edible gyoza. Best of all, moist shredded duck.

All-you-can-eat buffets rarely differ: cheap food, lots of it. At least COSMO feels clean. I once led a work group to the Red Hot World Buffet in Liverpool ONE and suffered what I can only describe as an existential breakdown. Here there are happy children, cheerful staff and a robot waiter blinking gamely before breaking down like a recalcitrant R2-D2. A staff member nudges it back into life – “they break down all the time,” they admit.

Back to the food. There’s a bowl of chipolatas inexplicably nestled among the Chinese mains. I dabble in tasty cumin-spiced lamb ribs and tough char siu. At the grill station, fat prawns are chucked onto the hotplate. They’re cooked fine but, despite a dousing in what promises to be garlic butter, they taste of nothing. At the sushi station, crab sticks and tinned tuna await – far inferior even to supermarket sushi. One young lad loads up. “I love it,” he grins. Wait until you discover Etsu, I think.

Most kids roam with plates full of chips, Yorkshire puddings and rice – discs of mostly yellow. My six-year-old lad would be happy here: unlimited fast food that doesn’t taste of much, self-serve ice cream and a funny robot. The playlist starts with family-friendly ‘90s hip-hop. “Who’s in charge of the playlist here?” asks a woman in a sparkling gold maxi dress. She has a point. Later, bizarrely, ‘Bring the Noise’ by Public Enemy vibrates the tasteless jelly cubes.

I venture back to sample the adequate curries, which remind me of work canteens, and check what I missed. ‘Mushrooms and celery’ – perhaps the most miserable dish ever. A sad chilli-and nachos station with an ominous yellow gloop. A vat of custard steams, as if waiting for Arnold Schwarzenegger to be lowered into it, thumb aloft. But there are plenty of veggie options: curries, stir fries, salads, things in sauce, things in batter – things in sauce and batter. My vegetarian wife is happy enough – eating out that’s not always guaranteed.

Criticising COSMO is, in some ways, unfair – like whinging that your seven nights in Marbella aren’t a summer on your own Caribbean island. Taken on its own terms, the food is mediocre at best, but that is not quite the point. In a country convinced it is permanently skint and miserable, people want a guilt-free night of excess on the cheap – an all-inclusive without the airfare.

We tell ourselves we want quality, but often we don’t: we want lots of stuff, fast and cheap. We claim to value craft and provenance, yet still queue for mass-produced samosas. Most of the leftover food will go in the bin. While legally understandable it feels morally inexcusable, but that’s part of the compact we make too. You may not find enlightenment beneath the heat lamps, but you will find plenty. And on a certain kind of payday evening, for many, that seems to be enough.

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