Red Hot Buffet Shack, Northampton

Red Hot World Buffet and Bar is the latest restaurant to open at Sixfields in Northampton. Sixfields is an entertainments venue (they call it a 'leisure park') encompassing Northampton Town's football ground, a Cineworld Cinema, a bowling alley and a whole host of different eating venues - from McDonalds to TGI Friday, Frankie and Bennies, Old Orleans and Bella Italia. You could be forgiven for thinking visitors had enough choice already but Red ...
...behind the McDonalds. A large red sign said 'Red Hot World Buffet and Bar'. Liking all things hot and spicy we decided to investigate.

The Red Hot Concept
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Red Hot opened just a couple of weeks ago and is the second restaurant by that name. The other is in Nottingham where (if the company's website is to be believed) it has built up a great reputation. The owners have chosen Northampton as their second ... more

Red Hot World Buffet and Bar is the latest restaurant to open at Sixfields in Northampton. Sixfields is an entertainments venue (they call it a 'leisure park') encompassing Northampton Town's football ground, a Cineworld Cinema, a bowling alley and a whole host of different eating venues - from McDonalds to TGI Friday, Frankie and Bennies, Old Orleans and Bella Italia. You could be forgiven for thinking visitors had enough choice already but Red Hot offers something new and different.

Background to our visit
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We often go to the cinema for early evening shows on Sundays; it helps me to feel as though I've actually DONE something over the weekend! The trouble is that for a 6.30 pm showing, it's too early to eat before we go and when we roll out two hours later I'm too hungry to want to go home and start cooking. This weekend after seeing Helen Mirren in 'The Queen' we decided to eat out and had spotted a new restaurant tucked away behind the McDonalds. A large red sign said 'Red Hot World Buffet and Bar'. Liking all things hot and spicy we decided to investigate.

The Red Hot Concept
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Red Hot opened just a couple of weeks ago and is the second restaurant by that name. The other is in Nottingham where (if the company's website is to be believed) it has built up a great reputation. The owners have chosen Northampton as their second venue and I for one and very happy that they did.

The concept is foods of the world - India, China, Thailand, Japan, Mexico and Italy - and the format is an 'all you can eat' buffet layout. I have to say that the words 'All You Can Eat' are normally an instant turn off for me - conjuring up images of spherical Americans eating pizzas bigger than their heads and gorging on nasty cheap fried foods of dubious quality. But on a Sunday evening with nothing exciting in the fridge, I'm willing to be flexible.

The pricing concept is one I've seen applied elsewhere and which some people might find slightly controversial. The lunch buffet costs £6.95 per person on every day except Sundays when it rises to £8.95. The dinner buffet is £11.95 every evening except Friday and Saturday when it is £13.95. Children eat for half price - sorry but I don't know at what age they stop being children.

Some people I've spoken to are horrified by this sort of demand-based pricing but if you think about it, it's no different from buying tickets with a budget airline - fly or eat when fewer people want to, and you pay less.

So what's it like?
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From the outside the approach to the restaurant is up decking steps with sunken blue lighting. There's a terrace outside with tables - a little ambitious for this time of year but I'm sure it'll do well once autumn and winter are out of the way. Entering through two sets of doors, you find yourself in front of the concierge desk, with the bar laid out behind and the buffet spread out on the right hand side. The restaurant is quite funky in design - no flock wall paper or cheesy prints of famous monuments here. It's bright and shiny with IKEA style furniture and lots of tables laid out in several areas on either side of the buffet tables. We were in a round shaped annexe at the far right of the building with about eight tables. At the opposite end of the building was the main seating area.

The music is intrusively loud and fast tempo - you almost feel you should be eating faster and faster as it pumps out around you. I'm not sure what they are trying to achieve by doing this. If the music's loud you don't linger, you don't talk and take your time so they can probably turn the tables around more quickly. On the other hand your jaws speed up to keep time with the beat and you munch through far too much food.

How does it work?
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We weren't quite sure what to do once we'd been delivered to our table. There was no menu to look at and it took a while to find the drinks menu. Nobody seemed to be particularly interested in getting us to order drinks, so we wandered over to check out the buffets.

In a relatively compact space, Red Hot manages to squeeze in a cold buffet with a wide variety of salads and cold dishes alongside an equally large hot buffet with about 2 dozen pans of hot food. Behind the 'help yourself buffet tables' there are cooking stations where you can order made-to-measure dishes. Pick your favourite pasta and sauce and they'll put them together for you there and then. You can choose from up to 20 different pizza toppings as well. Choose your favourite ingredients and sauce and the Chinese cooking station will 'wok' them up for you. There's a Japanese noodle bar, a Mexican station with burritos you can construct for yourself and of course lots of Indian starters such as samosas, bhajis and kebabs. Thai starters include fish cakes - my favourite - and spring rolls. Finally there are two desert tables - one with cakes, fruit, mousses and even some strange Indian rice pudding and the second is a 'Mr Whippy type' ice-cream dispenser and a hot chocolate fountain. Between the ice-cream dispenser and the chocolate fountain are lots of sweeties you can add to the ice-cream or coat in chocolate.

All the dishes were kept well stocked. Despite being a very large restaurant, we never felt squeezed around the buffet and could choose what we wanted without having to get our elbows out to force a path to the food.

Drinking
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The drinks menu is enormous - with page after page of cocktails on offer. I don't know whether you can just go into Red Hot and drink without eating - I would imagine that when it warms up again the terrace would be a pleasant place for a few drinks. However, they'll have to get wise on selling drinks if they want to take full benefit - we were half way through our main courses before we managed to find someone to bring us a bottle of water. We ordered a litre of fizzy water and received a 750 ml bottle of Ty Nant - so less than expected but a posher brand. In fact it was all a bit irrelevant as they forgot to charge us.

What did we have?
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I'd like to say a little bit of everything - but it would be more true to say too much of everything. There's something evil about the temptations of a good buffet.

We started with an assortment of starters - the Thai fishcakes were fantastic and I also had some cold noodle salad and some Indian nibbles. After doing our best with the starters we attacked the hot dishes. Often an 'all you can eat' is more of an 'all you can bear to eat', with either a very limited choice (especially if you don't eat meat) or a lot of very cheap dishes - with a big focus on chicken because it's cheap. Red Hot offers plenty of choice including king prawn dishes, so they aren't being mean with the ingredients. There's a lot of different dishes for vegetarians, fishitarians and meat eaters alike. They claim that the evening buffet includes over 100 different dishes and I suspect they may well be right.

By the time it came to desert, we were so full that we couldn't manage more than four or five! (only tiny portions of course).

Does this sort of dining really work?
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Purists would quake in their shoes at the thought of mixing all these different food types together without consideration to the balance of flavours. They are right of course - but there aren't many purists at £11.95 buffet tables! On the positive side, by including Italian food in the range, the owners have come up with a formula that should mean almost anyone (even those who don't like spicy food) should be able to find plenty to eat.

Who might enjoy Red Hot?
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Families will probably enjoy Red Hot - more sophisticated dishes for the adults, fun food you can play with (chopsticks provided, lots of things you eat with your fingers) for the kids. It's also a great way to introduce kids and adults that haven't tried many different 'foreign' cuisines to a range of food types without breaking the bank. Kids will love the ice-cream and chocolate fountains I'm sure.

Groups of colleagues and friends should consider Red Hot - none of the problems of not being able to go anywhere spicy because Bob from logistics doesn't like curry and Theresa from payroll won't eat anything with garlic. The set prices should also help to avoid punch ups when the bill comes at the end of the evening - no need to quibble over who had starters and who had two puddings.

Red Hot is great for a quick meal before or after a visit to the cinema or the bowling alley. Knowing that the food is there available as soon as you walk in will remove the stress of 'will we finish before the film starts'. It's also well placed for anyone going to the football or parking in Sixfields and sneaking down the road to watch the football.

It wouldn't be an ideal 'date' venue - there's nothing very romantic about eating your way through a mountain of food or choking on a chilli and the music is too loud for much conversation.

Any disappointments?
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There's no soup - I love all oriental soups and I would have thought they'd be a good cheap 'fill up' for the restaurateurs to make some money on. The Indian food is exceptional - I believe the owners are from that region - but the Thai selection in particular is a little thin. Japanese cuisine is poorly represented by a noodle bar - I'd have hoped for a little bit of sushi as despite its reputation for being pricy, I've often seen it included in similar buffet formats

Cocktails - I'm not convinced that cocktails are compatible with spicy food and I don't think the waiting staff could deal with the complexity on offer.

Staffing levels - we saw two or three table clearers working like ants to clear up after everyone but they didn't always get it right. Our plates weren't cleared between courses and we just dumped them on another empty table. There were no waiters or waitresses at our end of the restaurant and we did wonder whether we were supposed to go to the bar to get drinks. With such spicy food, I'm sure they could have sold a lot more drinks just by having more staff around to take orders.

The sweeties - there were no spoons on the table of sweeties for adding to the ice cream or sticking in the chocolate fountain. I asked one of the staff and he told me they put out spoons ten times a day and most of them get dropped in the chocolate. I don't want to eat any food that's been touched by the hands of dozens of grubby children - or adults - especially those on their way back from the toilets!

What's the competition?
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As listed before, Sixfields has a variety of eating venues - most of them more in the 'American diner' format.

There are no shortage of other Oriental and Asian restaurants in the area and just down the road at Sol Central in Northampton there is a very similar multi-cultural buffet restaurant called Aroma. I've not eaten at the one in Northampton because I don't agree with paying parking to go out to dinner and I find the town quite off-putting and intimidating at night. Sixfields' location offers a lot of benefits. However the Aroma in Braintree where I've eaten had a similarly broad menu but much more of a brightly lit cafeteria layout which felt very 'cheap'.

A few practicalities
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Parking - there's plenty. Just avoid going when Northampton Town are playing at home and their fans are sneaking into the car parks.

Toilets - I know some readers don't think a review is complete without a comment or two on the facilities. The ladies was spotlessly clean with nice glass sinks and pleasant paint work.

Opening hours - Lunch from 12 - 2.30 pm; dinner from 6 -11 pm.

Address:
Weedon Road
Sixfields Leisure Park
Northampton
NN5 5QJ
Telephone - 01604 586527

And finally…..
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Would I recommend it?
For a quick meal before or after the cinema? - definitely a good choice.
For a group nightout? - again, there should be something for all.
For a romantic and leisurely meal? - any man who thinks 'all you can eat' is romantic needs to take some advice on his seduction techniques!  

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