PapillionBusinesses.com Interview with Dong Sheng, Owner of Golden Apple Buffet and Serial Restaurateur Before Ribbon Cutting
Greeting with owner amd metal greeter sculpture, both have two fingers up in greeting. Sculpture is silver and orange with outfit that looks like a deep sea diver or astronaut.
So…it is amazing!
Thank you. We’re opening on Thursday, June 13 this week, and in the next couple of days we should be open. We got all the food coming today. And tomorrow we prepare, and we should be ready by Thursday morning. We’re gonna have a ribbon cutting on Thursday at 10:30.
At 10:30 is the ribbon cutting?
Yeah.
And then you’ll be open…
At 10:30, yeah. You can come to join us.
Oh, thank you. I’d be very happy to. It’s been fun to watch it. Sometimes I drive by and see it. It’s so amazing and so beautiful.
Thank you.
I could not imagine that.
Thank you. Yeah, yeah. And finally, we got the order, this special pass on Monday. So we already [can] see everything ready for what to do for the opening.
Tell me about your ideas for the design, and then we’ll get to the food, because this is just so detailed and beautiful, but relaxing and elegant at the same time, and comfortable. So how do you even get those together?
Yeah. Yeah, because we try upgrade all the buffet restaurants with a different [look] and let the people [see it] looks different. Oh, this is a buffet restaurant. Wow. That’s amazing. Maybe we want to let the customers feeling like you when they come into our restaurant and they like, relax… eating, have a good food and get to relax, enjoy it. That’s the way we try to do it. Because I design, all the colors and I spend a lot of time to get it all together. Now we got it. And it looks amazing, right?
It’s beautiful. How did you come up with the color scheme and the orange and the gold, silvers, and the little bit of black?
Because my favorite color is orange…and everything go across. … white and the yellow? It looks beautiful, you know? We have a number. We don’t want too many colors. You know, too many colors make people headache.
Yes.
But the first thing we want is people [to] love to come here. It’s nice and clean, and the food is good. You know that’s more important, you know, to have the customers to come … and also my design is always when people come into the restaurant, “Wow, it’s like a huge restaurant- buffet, sushi, hibachi, and a griddle and a steak and a pho …I spent $13.99, and everything… what I wanted”. That’s what I figure out and people will like it.
Please tell me about the food now.
We have a lot of items, over 150 items, that’s not including sushi, and a griddle and hibachi and a pho.
Can you send me a menu later?
…We have a menu, but it’s on the buffet. We don’t do the menu like a take-out restaurant kind of
So…anything you especially want people to know? Your hours, maybe, for the upcoming week for now, because they might change?
No, the hours… we’re open seven days a week. Monday through Thursday, we’re open from 10:30 in the morning till 9 at night. Friday and Saturday is 10:30 to 9:30, and Sunday is 11 to 9.
Now being here—I know that people can’t see it—you really know that this is a place to experience with your eyes and sitting here and eating. But do you have any, like, if someone wanted to get something to go, could they order?
Yeah, they can. They can. We have a to-go box and they can get whatever they want. And we have a scale at the front…They pay by the weight, you know and whatever it is, whatever it is.
Because you can’t let everybody take everything home either.
I mean, they can do whatever they want, but we have the weight. Not like a normal take-out restaurant. You know, we always go by the weight, by the scale.
We don’t do the order online. It’s a buffet style. But we do catering, like, for a big party order or weddings. We do deliver to the reception, wherever it’s going to be.
How long did all of this take since the first thought in your head?
How long? Long time. Over 30 years, almost 35 years by now.
Yeah. OK. So you’ve been wanting to put it here, to build here.
Oh, not for Papillion, though. I started in the restaurant business in ’80 and our first one opened in Nebraska in 2009.
Oh, OK, the first one.
Starting your business.
And that one’s in Lincoln?
It’s Omaha.
And I don’t remember this street.
It’s 114th and Dodge where I started. And I opened another one in Lincoln about 8 years ago.
What’s the one in Lincoln called?
Asian Buffet. Then I’d been looking for Papillion for many, many years and finally I got that location.
What made this location special to you?
Before COVID, we tried to find a location in Papillion. But at that time the COVID come and everybody stopped. Them after COVID then we kept looking for this location and talked to them about it, you know, and then finally we got it. Yeah.
I like your signage outside. It’s catchy. And then I saw your billboards and all those things. How did you come up with the name Golden Apple Buffet?
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. We have a Golden Apple in different cities and different states and we try to like many as we can, you know.
So, you have Golden Apple in other states?
Yeah, that’s right. We have a Golden Apple in other states. We try to keep growing.
How many restaurants do you have?
How many? For the mostly buffet, it’s going to be 6-7 right now, 6-7, yeah.
That’s amazing.
Yeah, we have one in Georgia, one in Flushing, NY… and one in Massachusetts… Boston, and one in St. Charles… St. Louis and one in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And we have one more store that’s gonna be right next door to us. It’s going to be called Gugu Ramen. It’s ramen and Korean fried chicken.
Oh wow. I’ve never had Korean fried chicken.
Yeah, yeah, it’s golng to be right next to this, on the south side of the building.
It’s going to be yours too?
Yeah.
Does the ramen have MSG?
No.
Oh, that’s wonderful…because I’ve tried ramen places around here and thy all have MSG.
The ramen we’re doing… we have a whole machine to make ramen. And in the soup pot, we can we have to make it like a beef bone. All kind of like, pork, you know, and some vegetables together. That takes over 10 hours.
No MSG. We want to do a healthy food to bring to the community.
Let me know when you do that one, because I’ll be happy to cover it too and I’d love to get a little video of the machine working because I don’t think anyone here has ever seen a ramen machine.
Yeah, and the ramen will probably be starting construction in the next couple of months.
And does that one have a name?
Yeah, it’s called Gugu Ramen.
What does gugu mean?
Gugu is fried chicken. Like a chicken goes “goo goo goo.”
Oh, the noise of the chicken.
Yeah, yeah. gugu and ramen together… the combination. It’s funny, right?
I guess the translation would be “Cluck Cluck Ramen.”
Yeah, right.
That’s fantastic. One of my favorite things to eat is soup.
Yeah, you will like it.
Yeah. And pho… and often it can have MSG, but it doesn’t have to. But I will just be slurping it down and embarrassing myself, I’m sure.
It’s very tasty, yeah.
Anything else you want to tell people and anything to not miss taking a picture of, it’s so amazing.
Tell people there’s a new restaurant coming to Papillion and they will like it. They will love it, for sure.
Yeah, there’ll be something for everyone, with such a large menu.
Most people like buffets. Some people like seafood, some people like chicken. Some people like hibachi, some people like sushi. We’re going to have a lot of sushi here. People get more choices.
It’s been rough around here to find good, fresh sushi…
Yeah, I have a big group, so we have good connections… a big group. One of the people handles one of the states. I handle Nebraska.
And with so many locations, you have your eyes and your ears knowing what’s good coming in somewhere.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah, I’m traveling a lot.
Are you going to do different styles of Chinese food, like Hunan, Mongolian, Cantonese?
We’ll have flavors from different parts of China. We have Japanese, we have Vietnamese. We have a Chinese Szechuan.
And they’re all tasty. Thank you.
You’re welcome. Thank you
It is located at:
Golden Apple Buffet
9614 S 71st Plaza #111
Papillion, NE 68046
See our previous stories here:
https://papillionbusinesses.com/blog/new-papillion-business-golden-apple-buffet-opens-13-june/
https://papillionbusinesses.com/blog/papillion-interview-dong-sheng-of-golden-apple-buffet/