Recently opened in the Market Place Mall area, Crazy Buffet (708 W. Town Center Blvd., Champaign) is a mostly Chinese buffet. It is a pretty decent place, with waiters standing nearby to pick up dirty dishes and refill water. They even came around to offer Sprite and Coke to the diners.

Buffet-style entrees are organized into several rows. About a third of them are seafood, such as shrimp, scallops, and octopus. There's also a salad bar, two dessert bars (excluding the ice-cream freezer), a cold bar, and a sushi bar.

The salad bar had the usual Caesar salad, as well as a eight or so other salads. The cold bar had cooked crawfish, mussels, shrimp, and raw oysters. I wasn't particularly craving salad or cold seafood at the time, so I passed on those stands.

Hot entrees included mayo shrimp, sweet and sour soup, shrimp and crab meat, skewered chicken, stuffed mushrooms, king crab, frog legs, long green beans, shellfish, baked mussels, lao mein, fried rice, deep fat fried scallops, cooked beef, steamed buns, shrimp dumplings, and sweet rice tetrahedrons. The shrimp dumplings weren't as great as the ones in Chicago, but I particularly liked the green beans and a couple of the shrimp dishes.

The sushi bar was pretty awesome. There were at least a dozen dishes of various sushis, made by two chefs behind a glass or plastic counter. You could even tip them! Some were regular sushi, with the seaweed outside; but California rolls, with the rice outside, and seafood sushi, with the seafood tied on top with seaweed, were also present. Ingredients included imitation crabmeat, avacadoes, tofu, shrimp, cooked crawfish, seaweed, dried krill, cream cheese, and various other seafood. My favorite was the California-style crabmeat roll with a crabmeat mixture in the center and rolled in dried krill.

The desserts were pretty good, though the variety wasn't as large as in Eastern Taste. There were the usual canned fruits, some cake, pudding, jello, and some cookies. The ice cream stand, however, was much more varied than in other buffets. I think there were about 10 different flavors, though I could only eat a cup of green-tea-flavored ice cream. But judging from the colors, I'd say that chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, orange, and cappucino were also in on the mix.

I think that this is a decent restaurant. But just for those rare occasional dining moments — unless you really do like eating fatty and oily foods 24/7.