If a restaurant has 384 seats you reckon there's a good chance of getting a table easily.

We can't even get in the car park.

There are 200 spaces but people are parking on the kerbs and grass. We bag a space two streets away.

We return to find customers queuing up to the doors.

"It's a 30 minute wait," says a lovely girl in a red and green uniform, who takes our names, gives us a numbered card and points to another queue where we buy our meal ticket. Literally.

The sum of £7.95 pays for all you can eat. As the signs proclaim. "Choose a table. Help yourself. Help yourself again."

We wait until our number is called.

Whitbread, which spent £1.3 million converting this former Brewers Fayre on the Wentworth Industrial Park at Tankersley into a mega eaterie, the sixth in the chain, has taken its cue from Chinese and Indian buffet restaurants.

It offers a carvery, pizzeria, pasta, fish, rotisserie, stir-fries, salad bar, soup kitchen and dessert section under one roof with an open kitchen, so you can see the food being cooked. There's even a pizza oven.

What's more it's all freshly cooked food, not heat and eat, and the quality is pretty good for the price.

While it may not taste sensational it is still excellent value. Barnsley has cottoned on fast.

"We're doing 8,000 covers a week. It has exceeded our expectations," says general manager Tony Devaney, delightedly. "Some people are making four visits a week."

The place is big, with all the charm of a school dining room, but it's tidy. Each time you take a trip to the food you collect a clean plate.

Some of Taybarns' 90 staff are on table-cleaning duties and you can stop one and ask them to bring you a drink.

Whitbread has resisted the temptation to hike the prices. A pint of Carling is £2.10.

There are just over 100 different food items on offer but old habits die hard with Barnsley folk. Faced with all that choice the family at the next table opt for burger, chips and beans.

Taybarns – if you ask what the name means Tony spouts some corporate waffle about it "embracing our core values" – is a family affair.

Well dressed families wait patiently for their names to be called, some nursing their children or plonking them on tables in the bar. And grannie comes, too.

Whitbread playfully urges its customers to be guzzlers. "What's the strangest combination you can have?" asks one sign. But it also nudges them to be healthy, with five-a-day promotions for fruit and veg.

On our visit the salad bar was relatively untroubled.

So what's it like? Well, just a taste: From the rotisserie, the lemon, garlic and thyme chicken was gently flavoured and pleasant, although some similarly flavoured baked fish was bland.

Garlic bread was excellent so I came back for pizza and that, too, scored highly.

Lamb and vegetable kebabs, juicily pink, slightly bready sausages and a too sweet sweet and sour chicken also went down the hatch.

At the carvery the roast turkey was excellent. If you can watch the food being cooked it sells itself so I had to have a couple of Yorkshire puddings pulled out of the oven.

There was a good selection of vegetables, although the best you could say about the gravy was that it was brown.

We finished up with some really good apple pie, rhubarb crumble and a high quality date and walnut cake.

As my wife commented, she'd happily pay £7.95 for the cake and a pot of tea in a country tea room.

The kids will love the squirty ice cream machine and did I tell you about the bottomless soft drinks for £1.95 – although Whitbread needs to work out a way to stop people using their empty beer glasses!

It's even cheaper, at £5.95, before 5.30pm. Children under 10 are £4.50 at all times.

Two of us paid £18.

While service is largely DIY I'm giving four stars as staff are so helpful.