China Blossom reopens buffet

NORTH ANDOVER — The buffet at China Blossom restaurant is back after an absence of four years.

General Manager Warren Chu said he was surprised to find a long line of diners waiting at the door when the buffet reopened last month.

“We completely got overwhelmed, we weren’t expecting it, we weren’t prepared for it, we were all scrambling to make everything happen,” Chu said. “I want to thank everybody for their patience.”

After shutting down during the pandemic, when China Blossom did a brisk business serving takeout, the restaurant reopened its dining room a year and a half ago. Diners have gradually been coming back, Chu said.

But running a buffet, which has always been a big part of China Blossom’s business, requires a level of staffing that the restaurant was struggling to reach.

“I think one thing that people underestimate is, doing something like this has got to go from the back of the house all the way to the front of the house, and that was our issue,” he said.

Not just cooks and waiters, but also people who prepare ingredients for cooking, runners who keep the buffet filled, hosts who answer phones and seat people, and someone to slice prime rib at dinner are all necessary for a smooth operation.

“If you’re missing one component, then it makes everything hard,” Chu said.

Chu, who graduated from Andover High School and Boston University, worked at China Blossom as a bus boy when he was young and took over as manager six years ago.

He says they are old school at the restaurant and like to do things by hand. But without enough people to roll the egg rolls that are served on the buffet, or to put chicken teriyaki on skewers, he had to cut back on these items for a while.

“As we start scaling up and getting employees to start covering all this, we can start doing some of these things again,” Chu said.

There have also been adjustments to make with suppliers, a few of whom went out of business during the pandemic, while others are struggling to source food items.

These include shrimp of a certain size, with their shells on. When Chu couldn’t find them, and put shrimp of the same size on the buffet but without shells, diners thought they were smaller.

“So we got larger shrimp with the shell on and cook them ourselves,” Chu said. “Little things like that, I’m working through.”

One thing that hasn’t changed at China Blossom has been the presence of Chu’s father, Richard Yee, who founded China Blossom in 1960 and still comes in every day.

“We try to stay true to his roots,” Chu said.

Yee was born in Canton, and the dishes at China Blossom are based on the lighter, Cantonese style of cooking, although they began to incorporate spicier Szechuan style recipes in the 1980s.

The buffet features the same popular items that appear on the menu, and the appetizers and main courses are mixed up at the steam table, to keep lines from forming.

One difference between the dinner and lunch buffets is that seafood is only served at dinner, with hot and cold options that include mussels, crab legs and shrimp. Dinner also features prime rib.

China Blossom still offers standup comedy on Saturday nights, in a 120-seat room where special functions can also be reserved.

These range from corporate meetings to baby showers, and the buffet makes it easy for the restaurant to serve food at these events.

“They can come right in, we put them on the buffet,” Chu said. “Nobody has to guess what their guests want.”