I like the way Wing Wah have expanded the dessert selection to include a wider range of gateaux and cakes. I like the way they decorated the mini swiss rolls with a blob of cream and a chocolate wafer. I also like the way they put a blob of cream and a raspberry on the jam tart. I don't like the way they decided to add a sprig of parsley to it.

It was a toss-up between the lunchtime buffet at China Red in Hertford Street, or the Handy Nasty (Han Dynasty) near West Orchards. We chose China Red simply because we were nearer to it at the time.

The buffet was fairly cheap at £5.90-ish. The selection was reasonable given the price. Starters included prawn toast, chicken satay sticks, ribs, spring rolls. Main courses included beef curry, sweet and sour chicken, noodles, rice.

The food was tasty, but the disadvantage of eating at lunchtime is that I can't eat as much as in the evenings, so I didn't get to have as many platesful as normal.

We went back to Aqua for a meal tonight. We were there as part of a conference organised at the University.

Everything seemed to go smoothly. When you are a group of over 50 people in a small restaurant, you appreciate that the service can sometimes be a bit slow, especially when they're still open as normal.

The food was excellent. When we arrived, there were bowls of olives on the tables. The first course arrived and consisted of plates of falafel and pizza. Subsequent courses had pasta, pizza and a bit plate of spiced chicken.

After the meal, most of us went down the road to the Whitefriars pub for a pint. A lot of the people with us were from other universities and they liked the old medieval building, and the range of beers on offer.

We've walked past this place lots of time but had been put off by the loud music coming through the front doors. It was much quieter this time so we ventured inside.

The restaurant isn't licenced but they have an extensive range of soft drinks, including freshly made fruit smoothies. We shared a mozarella and balsamic onion garlic bread starter, which was very good with lots of cheese stuffed inside. We then took advantage of their mid-week £4.99 pasta and pizza offer, and had a couple of 12" pizzas (wood fried according to the sign outside) and a penne pasta dish.

At full price, most main courses are around £7 each, which is good value. When the £5 offer is running, they become amazing value for money. An optional 10% service charge is added to the bill, but as the food was great and the service was friendly, we had no objection to paying it. This was in stark contrast to MYO where they added a compulsory service charge and illegally tried to force us to pay it. As a result we decided to never return to MYO but we're certainly going back to Aqua in the future.

They have a website which lists their menu and prices: www.aqua-food-mood.co.uk

This is a 'new' Persian restaurant Far Gosford Street. It's been open for a while now but this was our first visit.

It was fairly quiet when we went in. The proprietor greeted us and described the menu, recommending a few dishes. For our first course, Emma and I decided to stick to what we knew, and had Falafel and Halloumi. Neither was particularly Persian but both were good. The falafel was crunchy and doughnut shaped, and was coated with sesame seeds, which gave it some extra taste and texture. Stuart had lamb and mushrooms.

The main courses were mostly between £7-10, including rice. Slow cooked or stewed meats featured prominently. I decided to choose the proprietors recommendation, which was lamb cooked in a sauce with spices and a dried lime. We were brought a lime to examine, sniff and taste. It was unusual, with a more delicate flavour than I expected. Emma chose chicken legs which had been cooked in some kind of flavoured liquid or stock. A bowl of this cooking liquor was provided as sauce to go with the meal. Stuart chose one of the more expensive meals at £11, but it did consist of 2 different types of steak.

Emma and I were too full for dessert, but Stuart had Baklava. He seemed to enjoy it, eating it all without giving us a taste, although we'd had it before elsewhere.

The food was tasty, the service was friendly. I think this is another restaurant to re-visit, to further explore their menu.

If you know where to look, Coventry has some great restaurants.

I was still feeling a bit full after last nights visit to the Oriental Palace so I don't think I managed to eat as much as I might otherwise have done. This was an office trip which also included the Senior Manager and Secretary/PA so I thought it wise to show a little restraint and not over-fill my plate. This plan may have back-fired because I needed more visits to the serving area, so it may have looked like I was eating more than I was.

Jimmy Spices is yet another of the Asian/Italian buffet places which seem to be quite popular these days. The starters included spring rolls, pizza slices, assorted types of salad and pasta. Main courses were the usual selection of curries but also a 'Live Stir Fry' where you select the raw ingredients and have them cooked for you. There was no sign of the Thai food which is advertised but there were a lot of empty spaces where the serving bowls were so I imagine a fuller selection is offered in the evenings.

Puddings were more limited than at other buffet places. There was Fruit, Strawberry mousse, ice cream and something resembling a stodgy cheesecake but on a thin sponge base. The one novel feature was the provision of ice cream cones but sadly no sauces or sprinkles.

There were three of us this time around so we managed to try more dishes than last time. Never afraid to repeat ourselves, we started off with the excellent Dim Sum selection and Butterfly King Prawns this time with Curry Triangles, which were like small vegetable samosas and came with a curry sauce to dip them in.

We continued the familiarity theme with a repeat of the Jill Yuen chicken, which is battered pieces of chicken served with onions and chilli. The Crispy duck was also excellent.

The main course featured Noodles and beansprouts, and Sizzling Chicken with ginger. We felt like we still had some room left so had a second helping which included Pork and mushrooms and Egg fried rice. We would have managed ok if they hadn't brought us a double portion of rice.

Location: London Road, near junction 4 of the ring road.

We've driven past this place lots of times and noticed the banner on the outside of the building advertising their 'eat as much as you can' evening menu. Unlike most other 'all you can eat' places this isn't a buffet. Instead you get to choose from the menu and eat as many different dishes from each course as you can. The only other place I've been to where they do this was restaurant called Raffles in Chester. Although you have to wait a bit for each course, it does mean that all the food is freshly cooked unlike at buffet restaurants where it may have been sitting in the hot trays for an hour or more. See more ...

I seem to find it impossible to go to Wing Wah without over-eating and leaving feeling full and uncomfortable. I suppose it's because they have such a great range of foods and I don't want to leave without trying most of them. I also have to have some chocolate fountain and ice cream. When I got home I needed a lie down.

The much anticipated bar and restaurant complex in the Old Fire Station finally opened last month. One of the restaurants there is MYO which provides all-you-can-eat Indian, Chinese and Thai food.

They offer a fairly lacklustre salad bar but the Indian food really shines. There is a wide range of starters and curries. All the ones I tasted were very good with a nice balance of spice and heat. The Chinese food on offer includes a stir fry section where you choose from a range of meats and vegetables and have them cooked while you wait.

The dessert selection included the now ubiquitous chocolate fountain. There were mini bits of swiss roll and a really tasty treacle sponge available for dunking.

The only problem we encountered was when we asked for the bill. They initially tried to bill us for 8 people despite the fact that only 7 turned up. They were fairly quick at bringing us a corrected bill though. We were then horrified to find that they had added a 10% Service Charge. For a Self-Service restaurant! Drinks were brought to the table but we served ourselves food. One of our party paid by credit card and they forced him to pay the full amount including the compulsory enforced tip. We paid the rest of the bill in full and left them some change for the tip but it fell slightly short of the 10% they demanded. It soured the whole dining experience and I'm unlikely to ever go back there again.

We chose from the Christmas menu. This starts with a small bowl of root-vegetable crisps then a choice of starters. I had Caesar Salad and Emma had Garlic Bread Quattro Formaggi. For our main courses Emma had the Padana pizza (goats cheese, spinach, red onion) and I had the Natale (a kind of Christmas Dinner pizza with turkey, prosciutto and stuffing). A couple of weeks ago I had the idea to make a similar pizza myself. It was good to see such a pizza in a restaurant. Theirs came on an impressively thin and crispy base - ours probably wouldn't because we haven't perfected the art of thin bases yet.

We both started to feel a little full but we couldn't leave without a pudding, especially because it was included in the price. The Torta di Milano was suitably moist, cakey and creamy. The Chocolate Glory wasn't on the christmas menu but they allow substitutions. It was a wonderful assembly of ice cream, cake and chocolate sauce.

This was the first time we had eaten here since the place recently reopened after being refurbished. The previous time was actually a take-away so we had an idea of the food on offer. The restaurant is much smaller than Wing Wah and has a smaller choice of food but the quality is every bit as good. Prices are slightly lower with evening dining costing around £12-13.

The selection of starters was good. Chicken and sweetcorn soup went down well and came with optional croutons. Crispy seaweed was sweeter than at Wing Wah but still acceptable. There were the obligatory crispy duck pancakes and some tasty steamed dim-sum type dumplings.

The teppanyaki was disappointing. Instead of selecting a plate of meat, vegetables and/or noodles and taking them to be cooked, you choose a piece of chicken, steak or salmon and have that cooked, and then add accompaniments from the main courses on offer. The Dessert selection was reasonable. We were impressed by the small pots of jelly, trifle or cheesecake. We missed out on the chocolate fountain; it was running on empty when we were there and only got re-filled as we were leaving.

We were going to go to Turmeric Gold tonight because it was our 3rd Anniversary dinner and we thought we should go somewhere special. While we were on our way out Emma decided she was in the mood for a chinese buffet. We hadn't booked so it was easy for us to chang our minds at the last minute.

We were in the area visiting a couple of hamster-owning friends of ours and they suggested we go out to a chinese restaurant. They are big fans of Wing Wah whenever they are in Coventry so they wanted to take us to their local equivalent.

The food was very good - an all you can eat buffet with a wide selection available. Plenty of choice of meat, fish, vegetables, rice and noodles. I managed to try one of almost everything and it was all good. They also had a tepanyaki area where you could choose the food and have it cooked for you. Unlike Wing Wah, the chef doesn't put on a performance but just cooks the food plain and simple. It was well cooked though next time I'll forgo the chilli sauce - it was a bit too hot and overpowered the rest of the flavours.

The 2nd of Emma's birthday parties. This time held in the Wing Wah Chinese Restaurant in Coventry. They do an all-you-can-eat buffet for around £12-14 evenings and weekends, only £6 mid-day but there is less choice. As well as all the usual stir fried food (which is very tasty) they also have a Teppanyaki bar where you select the food you want cooking and it's cooked in front of you. It's fascinating to watch this in action, with the spatulas almost dancing across the grill as the food is mixed and cooked. The highlight of this is when the brandy gets added, and the grill briefly becomes a wall of flame.

The dessert selection used to be fairly typical until they got a chocolate fountain. I think you're supposed to use the sticks and fruit provided (usually lychees and melons) but we tend to pick other things off the dessert table and dip those as well - grapes, lumps of cake, that kind of thing. It's also good to collect some of the chocolate in a spoon and pour it over the ice cream where it sets into a hard shell.

The Wing Wah also have a special birthday dessert - usually a melon or pineapple filled with ice cream and with a giant sparkler sticking out. This is brought to the table with great ceremony to a recording of a chinese lady singing 'happy barthday'. We tried to make sure that Emma didn't fill up on all the other foods because two of her friends had ordered one of these. In the end, we still had to help her out eating it.

(photo of Emma and the ice cream taken by AndyMac. Andy - hope you don't mind me stealing your photos and using them on my site!)

We were going to go to Habibi (on Far Gosford Street) - we'd been there before, for Emma's birthday. It was where we acquired a taste for falafel. Unfortunately, we got there to find that it was closed on mondays. We walked down the road looking for somewhere else, and decided upon the Nawaz (a Balti House upstairs from Gosford Wine).

We'd brought a bottle of champagne with us to celebrate our anniversary. Thankfully, the place was unlicenced so we were allowed (encouraged) to bring our own drink.

We shared starters: Onion Bhaji and chicken tikka. For the main course, I had the Prawn with Dall Balti and Emma had the Chilli Chicken Balti. They came served in the huge metal bowls, and the servings were very generous. For accompaniment, we had the chicken fried rice and one Giant Naan between us. The naan was indeed giant. We ended up taking most of it home.

Verdict: The whole meal came to less than £20 for both of us. The food was great in both taste and value. The staff are friendly. Initially we were disappointed that we couldn't get into Habibi but we still ended up having a good night out and some good food.