Szechuan Castle — Restaurant in Edmonton

My fiancée loves Chinese food, it's her go to when she can't think of what she wants to eat. Normally we visit Beijing House, an excellent Chinese buffet on the northwest side of Edmonton. We decided to give Szechuan Castle a chance tonight since they're closer to our home. Had we known the difference in quality was going to be so vast, we would have taken the extra 15 minutes to drive to Beijing House instead.

Put simply the quality of the food was greatly lacking. The vegetables in the rice were clearly from the frozen section at Walmart, the sweet and sour sauce would be more accurately referred to as 'very sweet not sour' sauce, and the black pepper beef was mushy and overcooked; which is a description that fit many other items, in addition to the food being bland and barely warm. The list goes on, but honestly the only food items I found to be somewhat good were the chicken balls and spring rolls. If you can't get those right at a North American Chinese restaurant however, you're clearly in the wrong business.

The dessert table was also small and uninspired, serving what appeared to be squares of plain birthday sheet cakes, Jello, cookies, and oddly enough a bowl of mini marshmallows. Not sure what those could've been used for, there was no ice cream machine or anything like that for which they could've been used as toppings. After our meals, both my fiancée and I didn't feel great about what we ate. Not simply because it didn't taste good and we felt ripped off, but because it also made us feel somewhat ill for the rest of the evening. Not a great combination.

The service could've been much better as well. Drinks weren't refilled very quickly, the utensils provided felt cheap and blunt, other tables were left cluttered and dirty long after customers had left, and our cheque was brought to us before we finished eating. We had no plans of staying very long, but no one likes to feel rushed either. It's not like the restaurant was very busy, so the sudden drop off of the bill out of nowhere while we were eating our mediocre desserts seemed odd. It left a bad taste in our mouths that at least matched the literal bad taste of the food we had just consumed.

All in all it was a very disappointing experience, definitely not worth what we spent. We left with a bad feeling in our guts, both metaphorically and literally. I can safely say neither myself nor my fiancée will ever visit this restaurant again. We highly recommend visiting Beijing House instead if you're looking for a great Chinese Buffet that's well worth the money. They're on 137th Ave and St. Albert Trail, right by the Cineplex. Don't bother wasting your time or money at...

Well, I thought I would try this place for the first time based solely on all the glowing reviews on here. I went here on Friday night. Here are my thoughts:

The good: Nice place. Clean and modern throughout (except for that one ugly red wall which must have been missed when they renovated the place). Attractive cashier (except she didn't wait for an answer when she asked us how everything was...). The BBQ pork and shrimp were the best buffet items. The Wonton soup was pretty good. I thought the buffet was priced right.

The bad: My friend said her chicken (she ordered the Chicken Chow Mein) was cold and some of it did not seem fully cooked. She still ate it all. We were both surprised that it cost $2 more on the dinner menu than the take-out menu. About half of the buffet items I had, were cold. The plain Egg Foo Young was pretty bland. Lots of stare bears when we walked in. There was a table of about 10 VERY LOUD Filipinos who must have thought they were the only ones in the restaurant.

So, all in all, it was OK. Maybe I expected a lot more from having read all of the previous reviews. Three out of five stars, or a 6 out of 10 is my rating. So, a 60% chance that I...

I ordered from the Szechuan Castle due to the reviews on it, An for the most part it was quite good, but with that being said, the beef in the mixed vegetables was abit too tender.

Almost like it was boiled. From what I understand, the cooking process melts the collagen, turning it into gelatin and making the meat more tender. However, the process also tends to cook the meat itself, making it tougher. So too long or too high and the stewing beef is a very hard task, but in this case the meat was very tender and felt weird to eat.

I also ordered the satay beef and was expecting it to be spicy as indicated by the menu but it was not very spicy. Almost as spicy as gravy in a sense.

Among the order I also had Vietnamese spring rolls, Chicken balls and Shanghai Noodles.

The Deep fried foods were quite tasty and would recommend them to any of my friends but I did not eat any of the noodles, So I cant say much about it. It looked good from I can see at the time.

I would order again but maybe not anything with beef.

Also very happy the phone operator taking my order for delivery had a clear voice and repeated my order back to me in timely,...