Buffet Castle

My family and I love this place.  The owners are nice and the staff is very attentive.  The fresh choices come out regularly.  You can actually navigate this buffet with MSG free options.  It is our go-to for Chinese.

From the outside, this looks like the perfect place to go when your girl doesn't return your text message soon enough and you want to come back with a sob story about what a miserable time you had eating dinner alone. Chinese buffets, by design, are the gateway to quotidian personal catastrophe. With countless options, you can make dozens of mistakes all in one sitting, and end up with no one to blame but yourself.

To someone who hadn't done the buffet thing in a long long while, the range of this place was staggering. I think buffets are better than they used to be back in the day. Orange chicken, sizzling chicken, pork scallion, "pizza (no any meat)," triangular "onion rings," a weird brown liquid labeled "beef (for the tacos)," chicken-on-a-stick, a broad array of canned fruits, a wide range of sad-looking fried fish and shrimp, a small sushi bar with a chef ready to make your order, and all the ginger and wasabi you could want. Some of these things actually looked pretty good, but Steven King couldn't have thought of something as horrible as the "cheese mussel." I didn't chance it any more than I would think of cracking open the door of an abandoned house in the dark when there are cellos violently plucking in the background.

I chose just about everything else, with some green beans and tasty veggie lo mein, and I have to say, the food was surprisingly satisfying. I had the real second-class experience of tasting what might've been good when it was fresh. The only real disappointment was the packets of yellow mustard, a watered down version of the typical Asian restaurant mustard that I sometimes use to light my face on fire from the nostrils outward, when I'm feeling a bit down. I brought a book to read, but found myself instead reading the faces of a good sized collection of lone wolf diners of all ages, ethnicities, and girths. The diversity warmed my heart.

Some buffets are stingy on the fortune cookies, but this place gives a genuine shot at redemption to even the unluckiest soul. I mean, there's nothing to stop you from piling a heap of fortune cookies on your plate and cracking them all open until you finally hit the one that gives you some hope for the future. It's all on you.

After reading these reviews I became quite amazed with the positive feedback. I've experienced plenty of Chinese buffets and no joke, this was by far the WORSE buffet I've ever had.

The food isn't even "average" as someone had stated in a previous yelp review. I wasn't expecting much, but I was expecting at least something edible. The food was dry, cold, and had absolutely no flavor. At first glance, I was amazed with the wide variety, but after tasting the food I was disgusted.

The ice cream was horrible. As my boyfriend would put it, it tasted like, "flavor-less ice mud."

The fortune cookies were also flavorless and gave me a rude fortune, "Your problem just got bigger. Think, what have you done."

If I was an outsider reading this review, I'd think it was pretty funny. But after spending $20 on a meal that I thought could be edible, I'm extremely disappointed. I would never come back here again.

All in all:

The atmosphere is dirty. They never once came by to pick up our plates. There's food on the floor and buffet tables. All the silverware was sticky.

The food was either over cooked or under cooked. Cold, falvor-less, and disgusting. The salad bar wasn't even a salad bar - only included ice berg lettuce and a few toppings (which might I add most of the utensils were shared between other foods...UNSANITARY.)

The staff - well, I can't complain because they never once came by to greet us.

Reminder, you must PAY for your food before you eat. AKA: don't be expecting a refund any time soon!

Good luck and eat at your own risk.