One of New York City's sporadically interesting dining destinations is the Delegates' Dining Room on the fourth floor of the United Nations. Frequently, the Dining Room is open at lunch to those who are not members of the United Nations community. For most of the year, the Dining Room represents an attractive "white table cloth" venue with well spaced tables, views over the East River, a polyglot clientele, professional service and an "international" buffet featuring generally unexciting preparations using high quality ingredients at a very reasonable price for the value.

The buffet typically includes a soup, a few dishes that would be considered appetizers, salads, side dishes, a carving station, chafing dishes of entrees, some cheeses, ice cream and an extensive table of desserts. A few times each year, following no pattern that I can discern, the Dining Room brings in a team of chefs from some country or region of a country, and for a week or two the invitees prepare most of the dishes comprising each meal, using their local recipes. Within recent memory, these ethnic meals have been prepared by, among others, chefs from Wales, Korea, Malaysia and two regions of Spain.

In October 2007, I was part of a group that went to sample the Dining Room's Portuguese Food Festival. As is normally the case when outside chefs are in charge, the format of the buffet remained unchanged.

Instead of the usual assortment of rolls and bread, the waiters brought around a ciabatta style bread, laden with chopped garlic, presenting it as being Portuguese.

The day's soup was chestnut, which sounded intriguing but turned out to be an overly bland puree. Another starter, rock shrimp in garlic, proved far more successful. The tender, succulent crustaceans found great favor with our party and with other diners and were repeatedly depleted from the buffet.

The various salads and cold dishes, including beets, anchovies and smoked or cured salmon, were unexceptionable, but also not at all unusual. Even among the hot dishes, a well executed version of peas and onions, sauteed small skin-on potatoes and overly greasy cubes of crispy polenta did not seem recognizably Portuguese.

The offering at the carving station was a leg of veal, which I did not try. Two other straightforward meat dishes, small, flavorful slices of roast beef au jus, and rack of lamb, were tender and enjoyable.

Among the other hot dishes, a mixture of tuna, kale and white beans was tasty, as were the monkfish medallions in a chopped olive sauce. Perhaps the most unusual and addictive of the hot preparations was duck rice, enhanced by shredded duck meat, thinly sliced duck sausage and what appeared to be duck bacon.

The ample spread of desserts contained pies, cakes and tarts of numerous kinds, but nothing that was characteristically Portuguese.

When I asked a member of our party, who was Portuguese, for his reaction to the food, he opined that everything that was available might have been served in Portugal but there was nothing that was uniquely Portuguese. In fairness, I should note that, aside from the desserts, the cooked portions of the meal could have been almost totally different a day earlier and a day later and might have left us with a different impression.

Diners from outside the United Nations who wish to patronize the Dining Room must make reservations, so as to have their names on the list of visitors sent in the morning by the restaurant to the security desk in the ground floor lobby. After visitors complete an airport-type security screening, they have to wait on line at the security desk where one member of the party must surrender a photo ID in order to receive a pass to go upstairs to the Dining Room. Parties that are not complete can get upstairs only with great difficulty. The Delegates Dining Room offers good, and occasionally interesting, food in a civilized setting, but is not easily accessible and is not for the spontaneous or for those with limited time.