Tonight we dive into the culinary troughs of hell at the latest sensation to bewitch Glasgow - the eat til you pop buffet restaurant.

As we join the thronging crowds - and it really is mobbed in Darnley this evening - I have a flashback to my previous Glasgow buffet thrill. Then, urged by my son with the immortal words, "but all my pals have been", we pitched up a China Buffet King.

Snobbishly, I assumed it would be like Farm Foods after the fryers exploded. The Buffet King was much worse than that. As we picked our way through half filled trays of deep fried dross - including fish fingers - I realised we must have arrived too late for all the, ahem, decent food.

Cook and Indi's here have amazingly - according to them anyway - expanded the concept by including six whole cuisines, adding Italian, Spanish and Mexican to the usual Chinese, Indian and, er, is the sixth the carvery? There may be some Thai dishes too, although like the Spanish dishes, I can't find many.

First impressions? Sidelining the pretentious food critic, kids love this whole concept and there are loads of them here with their parents. No wonder. There's a full size chocolate fountain, fruit for dipping, heaps of marshmallows and even mini doughnuts.

There's even a full bifter Crolla's ice cream parlour around one corner, across from the Chinese food and nestled close to a very small and largely untouched sushi bar.

But grown up kids like buffet too and I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a sense of anticipation as we round the corner to see tureens heaped with different foods.

OK, nothing will make me try that vat of spaghetti bolognese and the pizzas are a bit thick looking, though the pizza man is pulling them out the oven for the kids at some rate.

But the serving area is softly lit, the pans are well labelled and lidded and while it's a bit of a squeeze around here in the rush, with lots of "sorry, mate" and "you first, pal" going on, it's clean and well ordered.

There's a reasonable chicken chaat, and a lamb Lahore kadai and a handi chicken, both served on the bone and fine. I can see what happens to heaps of egg fried rice when left in a lidded vat too long so I pass on it and try fried noodles with my next plate.

There's something odd going on with the texture of that chilli beef, the vegetable pakoras are bullet tough, and the potatoes in the potato salad with artichoke have such an unpleasant earthy taste that I point it out to the chef - well, he did ask. He denies point blank there is anything wrong with them, even though we both taste it and then we agree to disagree.

In theory the great thing about a buffet is if you don't like something you can move on until you find something you do.

The carvery gammon is sweet and pale and unctuous, the roast beef pink in the middle, though both are hacked off in mighty slabs.

But, and there's always a but, tonight this has got to be one of the most unrelaxing places in town to eat. The music is surging loudly, boom-boom, boom-boom, there's a constant stream of human buffet traffic - including us - past the tables and although plates are cleared quickly they're still obvious on empty tables.

The tables are not actually that close together, but the seats all have very high backs which only adds to the claustrophobic feeling.

And, of course, foodwise, on the same grounds that you can have too much of a good thing, you can easily have far, far too much of a very mediocre thing.

Yes, it's fun for kids, including grown-up ones - but the quality is as expected and like all pile 'em high buffets it leaves me with a curiously unsatisfied feeling.