Ruby Garden

When I moved to Ava in 1998, I was astonished to find such a good Chinese restaurant in such a small town. The name used to be "Red Dragon" and the location was just about a tenth of a mile east of the present location, which opened in late 2007. The food and space are much improved over the old version, too.

This is the only place i know of in middle America that serves all-you-can-eat crab legs year-round (on Fridays) at a reasonable price. The rest of the buffet is very good, with a wide enough variety to satisfy almost any palate.

But.... since this is the only Oriental restaurant in town now, I find myself wishing they'd make a few minor changes and bring my review up to five stars. Those changes would be as follows:

(1) Lighten up on the sugar in the food (I rarely eat dessert here because the meal itself usually has enough sugar in it to induce diabetes if you don't already have that disease;

(2) figure out what soup spoons are, and provide them;

(3) try to use less oil in the stir-fry dishes;

(4) have at least one dish on the buffet that doesn't contain meat (aside from steamed rice and green beans);

(5) teach the wait staff to cut lemons correctly (so they can be squeezed without spraying juice all over the place);

(6) change to a better type of napkin in the napkin holders - the current ones are useless;

(7) if you don't want people to waste food, start charging them by the ounce for whatever they leave on their plates, instead of raising prices on everyone to cover the cost of what the gluttons waste;

(8) get some larger pots for boiling the crabs, and serve more of them at one time. As it is, you have a dozen people waiting in line for a serving of crab, then you bring out enough to serve a few people, then the rest have to wait up to 30 minutes for the next batch.