Before you read about the food I’m reviewing, you need to hear the back-story first. It all started on me and wife’s 18th anniversary. We had decided that we would have a romantic evening at Carraba’s, and then end up loitering at the gas station for the rest of the evening. However, upon arriving at Carraba’s we had discovered that the restaurant had been temporarily shut-down, something about a vicious case of lobster slaughter in the 1st degree. Anyway, wife and I were hungry, and for 11 ungodly minutes, we scoured the nearest five-mile radius for someplace to eat. At some point in our search, we wandered into a very peculiar restaurant. Inside the building was a large room filled with sets of unimpressive chairs and tables, each gleamed with the light reflecting off their plastic surfaces. On the other end of the room, a large bar with a series of took up almost the entire wall space. As wife and I entered, we noted the layout as neither of us had seen a restaurant like this before. After waiting 10 minutes for a server to seat us, we belligerently took our own seats near a window. Confused, we sat there with no menus to speak of, and not a waiter in sight. Eventually, we grew impatient and we stood up to talk to whoever was running this place. At the bar, a rather large woman stood seemingly unaware of our presence in this place. Upon approaching her and giving her our full list of grievances, she promptly turned to us and asked, and I quote, “How can I help ya sir?” Surprised, and utterly caught off guard, we replied, “Yes.” The woman, whose nametag read “Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen: Tiffany”, simply stood there and stared at us. After what seemed like 22 seconds of awkward silence, she asked “Did ya want ta order something from the menu sir?” As she said this she pointed to the ceiling, and upon following the direction of her finger, we saw an enormous menu right on the wall. The menu, which appeared to be organized in a fashion similar to 12th century Arabic sand script, was surrounded with numbers. Baffled, wife and I blurted out “Three!?” Tiffany then started punching buttons on a odd looking machine in front of her. She then asked if we wanted anything else, to which we replied “Drinks?” Tiffany gave us this look and asked “Medium?” We both stared at her, wondering why she had asked us about a psychic medium, so, to humor her, we just smiled and nodded our heads. Tiffany slammed more buttons on her machine, asked for $6.24, and unceremoniously told us to have a nice day. Almost immediately, our food arrived, and to our surprise, it wasn't the number three on a plate. We arrived back to our seats, set down our food, and then we were off to get our drinks. To the left of the bar, a large machine sat on a counter-top with a variety of funnels and labels from different soda brands. Upon asking the machine for Dr. Pepper, it rather rudely refused wife’s request. But it wasn’t until I punched it in the funnel that it started to bleed soda. So wide and I developed a system where I would punch the funnels and she would hold the cups under them to collect the soda blood. Deciding that our drinks were too warm, wife had me start punching the largest funnel on the machine, labeled ice, in the hopes that it would bleed ice cubes. To our luck, it did, and we returned to our seats with our cups of the machine’s blood and ice cubes. The food they gave us tasted nothing of the number three, and the soda blood was poor to say the least. But the ice cubes we ate were out of this world. I don’t know what they do at Popeye’s, but that was the best ice we had ever had. When we held it, it was cold, so cold that it began to hurt. And it was especially strange because it was almost a kind of burning pain. In that moment wife and I realized why this ice tasted so good, and why this place was so bizarre. This restaurant, and this ice, was made and controlled by some sort of wizard. Of course, it was the only explanation that made sense anymore. Catapulting over the bar, and pushing Tiffany into an open vat of fryer grease, we confronted the owner and demanded to know how he made is ice. Bewildered, he simply said “It’s just ice, calm down…” Calm down?! This monster was holding back the secrets of the mankind’s greatest invention, and he told us to calm down. Wife and I weren't fooled by his “I’m-an-innocent-bystander-who-doesn't-know-what-your-talking-about” act, obviously he was using black magic to create this wondrous ice and he was going to keep it all to himself, in order to lure people into this horrible place. We had to get that recipe. The next day, wife and I returned to Popeye’s and nonchalantly ordered one medium drink from a now very crispy and delicious Tiffany. After filling the cup with ice, we promptly dumped all the ice into wife’s purse and made a break for it. When we got home, to our surprise, her purse was devoid of any form of ice, and instead her purse was soaking wet with water. That’s when wife and I figured out that the black sorcerer who owned the Popeye’s had place a hex on the ice that prevented it from leaving the restaurant, and as a cruel gag, replaced the ice with horrible, purse-flavored water. That abomination had to go down. After a prompt Google search in Bing, I was able to locate and purchase a copy of the “New Jersey Book of the Dead”. When it arrived 3-5 business days later, wife and I had already finished planning out Operation: Freezer burn. Using the New Jersey Book of the Dead, we would summon a horde of poltergeists to attack the front area of the Popeye’s. While Tiffany and the owner are busy ghost busting, wife and I would break into the back of the restaurant and steal the ice recipe from the owner’s office or cave dungeon. Unfortunately, we did not find the recipe anywhere, not under the piles of horse meat, and not even inside the cockroach-infested bathrooms. That’s when wife and I figured that the ice witch had been keeping the secrets of the ice in his apartment lair. As the owner and Tiffany were bustghosting the last couple of poltergeists, Wife and I sneaked out, and through a quick Google search of the owner’s name, we were able to find the address of the ice demon. Immediately heading there, we prepared for a swift, clean, in-and-out, break-in. After wife had finished prepping the 8 ½ pound blocks of C4 on the front door, and I had finished creating a flask of blinding powder, we were ready to storm the lair of that monster. Staying a safe 500 feet away, we destroyed the front door of that monster and the front doors of his 5 closest neighbors. Rushing in we saw one of his minions in the form of a cat, licking its paws, content with itself and the gaping hole we had made. Before it could strike, I threw my blinding powder at its eyes and it yowled and ran away before we could finish it. A brief search of the apartment afterwards yielded no sign of the ice recipe, and we were starting to get desperate. Just when we were about to head back to Popeye’s to double check the horse meat, the evil demon appeared. His presence was marked with his death screech, sounding eerily similar to the words “WHAT HAPPENED TO MY APARTMENT?!” In that moment, wife attacked and, using what she had learned serving in Desert Storm, promptly throat kicked the demon 13 times. On the final blow she knelt down and whispered “That was for Santa Monica, and the ice.” And with that the vile owner of Popeye’s perished. In that moment, we were both filled with joy and then a soul-shattering despair. The secrets of the ice had been lost and we had gone to all the effort with nothing to show for it. Then I remembered the minion! Of course, the minion must have the recipe on it, which is the only other place it could be. Using wife’s seventh sense, we tracked down the cat minion to an alley behind the New Century Buffet. With it cornered and blinded, it took only a mere 5 throat kicks to finish it off. Alas, the recipe did not manifest on the cat-creature like we had hoped. And to help cope with our losses, we covered the minion’s body in cement and placed it in a 6x6 ft concrete cube, and buried 120 ft below the Earth’s surface. Tired, hungry, and a little bloated, we decided to finish off the rest of our anniversary eating at the New Century Buffet. Entering the restaurant through the back entrance, we made our way through the stacks and stacks of dog kennels and the dirt-caked serving plates, and took our seats at a booth in the front of a restaurant. In the mood for Chinese wife ordered a glass of water and the Pad-Thai with a band-aid in it, and I order a glass of melted ice cream and orange chicken with gobs of toothpaste in it. When our drinks arrived however, we noticed the ice cubes in our drinks. Looking at each other wistfully, we nodded and grabbed an ice cube. We both ate one. I will say that the ice was good, but it wasn't anything to kill for. The ice was cool, but lacked that crunchy cold taste that we had tasted previously. That it why I give New Century Buffet 3/5 stars for their ice cubes.