I'm staring down at my plate with a pool of congealing chicken tikka nestled next to a Yorskhire pudding, squashed next to a pepperoni pizza, sogging into the ends of mushy lasagne - all shored up by a giant potato wedge.
Like a newly-qualified captain of the good ship Buffet, I attempt to navigate this hastily assembled pile of food by wading into it with a triangle of naan bread.
But even with such moist plate companions, the bread, which should be warm and fluffy, gives an unyielding rock hard crunch as I bite into it - and I swiftly cast it to one side in disgust.
Yes, I have entered the weird and not-so-wonderful world of the all-you-can-eat buffet, at Manchester’s newest addition to the gluttony scene, the shiny new COSMO on Deansgate.
It has taken up the spacy corner site previously occupied by another all-you-can-eat giant, Red Hot World Buffet, which blazed a queue-inducing trail during its two or three year reign in the city before closing down in 2016.
At its peak, Red Hot World Buffet was raking in £140,000 a week - putting it on a par with San Carlo as the highest grossing restaurant in Manchester.
After a £1m refurb, COSMO - which has restaurants all over the UK - entices you in with its glamorous sheen, those capitalised letters evoking cocktails and fashion mags, and a sparkling entrance hall leading up to the main dining room via a gleaming spiral staircase looking like something out of The Great Gatsby.
The restaurant itself is not quite so spectacular though, relying on an industrial looking ceiling and brick-effect wall coverings. The space - much as the food we are about to discover - is largely functional.
We are ushered into leather booths in a busy restaurant packed with families on a Thursday night.
They are rather harassed looking families, if I’m honest, who have ended up here because they simply could not bear to hear their little darlings fighting over whether it would be pizza or Chinese for tea that night, so plumped for a place with a little bit of everything.
I’m sure this is the sort of place that little nippers must feel their dreams really have come true. There’s an entire wall devoted to cakes, ice cream, chocolate fountains and sweets, for goodness sake.
COSMO boasts 160 different dishes in all, with cuisine ranging from Indian, Chinese, Japanese to a good old British carvery - and you pay a fixed price (which varies depending on the day you go) to eat as much as you can stuff into your gob - on a Thursday night this was £14.99. Kids (under 150cm) go half price, which probably explains why it’s so popular with families.
Is there a good way of negotiating a buffet of this scale? If there is, I, and everyone around me, haven’t quite found it.
Etiquette is out the window as you just greedily pile on as many different foodstuffs as you can on to your plate. It’s like a level of The Generation Game.
The longer I stared at the congealing mess on my plate, and looked over at a little girl next to me tucking in to popcorn, sausages AND sweets on her plate, the more I just thought of the utter madness of this place. Of buffets in general.
Yes, I know they’re hugely popular but what are we all doing to ourselves? We don’t REALLY need four plates stuffed with croissants, sausages and sushi in one sitting do we?
I’d take quality over quantity any day of the week. And I’m afraid quality was sadly lacking in most of the items I sampled on this visit.
We booked an 8.30pm table, so I suspect that being at the tail end of the sitting (which finishes at 10.30pm), meant we perhaps weren’t getting the freshest of offerings - hence that rigid naan bread. And my potato wedge was already cold by the time I was back at the table.
Items that remain served under the hotplates, like the carvery and pizza - which was actually my favourite item of all selected - fared better. But my tikka massala tasted curdled. I’ve eaten better microwave Indian meals.
Perhaps I just chose badly. Because my companion wolfed down no less than four, yes, FOUR plate-fulls of different foodstuffs and was in raptures about it all.
He particularly enjoyed the make-your-own ramen soup that he packed with noodles, prawns and chicken. and he was very pleased with his haul from the fresh-made teppanyaki grill too.
And this is the thing about buffets that sell so much stuff - it can be a hit-and-miss affair and the compulsion to try all of it and not miss out on the best bits can be overwhelming.
On the plus side, we had a super-friendly waiter packing plenty of cheeky banter during our visit. And the desserts were also a pretty amiable affair (if you’ve still got room, that is).
There’s a whole raft of tiny squares of cakes so you can have little samples, rather than waste giant chunks, and little pots of ice cream. We liked the sweet lemon cake and warm pudding with custard.
We really didn’t need the egg-shaped sweets that we stuffed on the plate alongside it though.
Who ever really does?