Let’s get this out of the way right at the start: Izzy’s is not my favorite restaurant in Central Oregon. In fact, if I were pressed, I might tell you it’s toward the bottom of my list.

To give this regional chain its due, the budget-priced buffet establishment on Bend’s north side — one of 16 Izzy’s in the Northwest, all but three in Oregon — keeps a lot of diners happy with its pizza and salad bar, along with a range of hot entrees and desserts.

Now, I haven’t visited Izzy’s Redmond restaurant. In Bend, however, the quality level is not high, with the exception of sirloin steaks grilled to order as a complement to the buffet menu.

Established in 1979 in Albany and Corvallis, the group began as a spinoff from a pair of Shakey’s Pizza franchises. It peaked a few years back with more than 20 restaurants. Pizza remains a mainstay, along with large salad bars that make lunch the best meal of the day.

In Bend, on my recent visit, the salad bar offered such basic salads as crispy iceberg and Caesar mixes, baby spinach and coleslaw, potato and macaroni salads. It also featured a crunchy chicken salad with Napa cabbage and a “power salad” with craisins and edamame.

The selection included about a dozen more vegetables to add, among them sliced beets and broccoli, mushrooms and tomatoes, peas and kernel corn, kidney beans and cucumbers.

There were raisins and sunflower seeds to sprinkle on top, and eight different dressings, ranging from a light raspberry vinaigrette to a rich blue cheese. A ranch dressing with fresh dill suited me just fine.

There are also a couple of soups of the day: I opted for a cheesy cream of broccoli, which was not as dense as it might have been, over a chicken noodle blend.

Clean and cordial

Now, the restaurant is clean and well maintained, and service is cordial and efficient, insofar as one might expect at a buffet. Beyond seating newly arrived guests and clearing used plates to make way for new ones, there’s only so much that must be done.

Before I headed up to the salad bar for my first serving, however, my server was sure to offer a beverage and a choice of special selections from the grill. Six local craft beers are on tap at Izzy’s, but I found the selection of California wines (from an Oregon company) to be absolutely appalling: red, white or pink?

The grill selections were steak or fish. By the time I had finished my salad, I had a small portion of each to sample. The batter on the hand-dipped tempura cod was so thick, I could barely find the flaky seafood inside of it. Japanese tempura batter is ideally paper thin, and this was anything but.

The flame-grilled sirloin, however, was delivered medium rare, exactly as I had ordered it. And it was more tender than I had anticipated. An unapologetic dollop of blue-cheese butter melted into the meat as I ate.

In retrospect, I should have had another 6-ounce steak and called it quits for the meal. But readers need to know what the rest of Izzy’s selection was like. It wasn’t good.

Keeping it hot

The problem with so many hot buffets — and Izzy’s was no exception — is that food keeps cooking when it is transferred to serving dishes with heating elements beneath them. Thus everything from beef ribs to fried chicken to sweet-and-sour pork were dry and overcooked. Kernel corn and green beans were almost assuredly not fresh from the farm.

A dish of fire-roasted vegetables — fresh carrots and squash seasoned with herbs — was one of the better selections in a mediocre buffet that was dominated by carbohydrates. There was macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes with gravy, curry rice, roasted potatoes, spaghetti with marinara sauce. This buffet is not a place for calorie watchers.

Neither, of course, is the adjoining pizza counter, where a half-dozen different styles are offered by the slice. These are fresh pies, some thin crust, some thick; you might find anything from a traditional pepperoni pizza to a vegetarian variety with green pepper and artichoke hearts. The restaurant makes its own pizza dough and bread sticks.

And then there is the dessert bar. I had no room for sweets by the time I reached this point of the evening. But Izzy’s makes its own sweets, and the selection seemed to represent a bit of everything. I saw bread pudding, a berry cobbler, cinnamon rolls, three kinds of cookies. I also saw Jell-O dessert, tapioca pudding, and soft ice cream with sundae toppings.

If I were to return to Izzy’s, it would be for a flame-grilled steak and a salad bar.

— John Gottberg Anderson can be reached at janderson@bendbulletin.com.