The Silver Spring Penguin

One must question the wisdom of culling every form of bad mall food, then splaying it on a buffet table. It’s a bad idea. A really bad one.

That’s how it rolls at the Blue Pearl Buffet and Grill (8661 Colesville Rd), placed appropriately in City Place mall’s dismal basement. For $11 ($7 during the work-week lunch hour), large families and shit-broke coeds can fill up on all the overcooked Chinese food they can stomach.

At least “overcooked” has its variations. For example, Blue Pearl’s shu mai — a small medallion of a pork dumpling — is pan fried beyond recognition. What results is a tough mound of ground pork wrapped in leathery dough. It’s like eating a baseball.

The cheong fun, a wide rice noodle wrapped around shrimp, demonstrates how something can be over-steamed. The wrapper is dense and sticky, nearly to the point of gooey. Meanwhile, the shrimp is chewy, like a wad of gum stuck to the bottom of a theater seat.

For red-meat eaters, the skewered beef is smothered in a thick coat of bitter cumin, then grilled until dry. The barbecued pork ribs are equally dry, taking on a stringy, rope-like texture with every bite (above).

One of the few things to escape the kitchen’s zeal for high heat and long cooking times is the sushi bar. While the ingredients are relatively fresh, they lack flavor. The nori seaweed wrappers miss their salty, somewhat smoky taste. The seafood fillings are practically invisible.

Despite a hot bar that stretches 20 feet, the pickings are merely variations on a theme: tough meat plus limp veggies in a lifeless, soy sauce-based brown gravy. Traditional flavors like those of bright ginger, garlic and scallions are completely absent, replaced with a metallic taste from the stainless-steel chafing dish.

Forget about the dessert bar’s ice cream, too. Ice crystals form when soft-serve ice cream is kept at too low a temperature, as it is at Blue Pearl. What results is a pasty, mealy swirl that’s hardly worth the Styrofoam cup in which it’s served.

The dimly lit dining room is cavernous and loud, and its wall-to-wall carpeting can be sticky in some spots. At least the staff is quick to clear dirty dishes, even if they’re not as quick with refilling empty glasses.

Blue Pearl Buffet and Grill, 8661 Colesville Rd, Silver Spring, (301) 565-4334.