Pagoda Downtown Restaurant — Restaurant in Hamilton

New owner apparently, no longer owned by the older couple who have run it for years. Incredibly dissatisfied with what has become of my once favourite chinese food spot.

Found out the hard way they are under new ownership, called to place an order at 730 pm and was told I would receive a call back with my total. Wait an hour, no call back, so I call back to make sure I have enough cash. Am told they are busy and she promises she will call me in 5 min. Fast forward an hour, 930, I call back again, to be told she forgot to take down my number so couldn't call me back and wasnt sure if I wanted my order.. Fine, I get it, confirm everything and am told it will be an hour for my order. So dinner at 1030, ok.. it's a bit late, but the kids aren't in school.. no biggie, right? 1030 comes and goes, at 1130, I'm not happy. I call the store and ask what's going on. I am told they have no drivers and the owner is delivering. I saw I have 3 kids, we have been waiting since 730, I offer to drive over and pick it up. The woman on the phone says the driver is on his way back and I'll have my order in 15 min or so...

Fast forward to 1230, still no call.. no food... I call back AGAIN, I'm told he is out with my order, he only had 2 deliveries and is on his way to me now.. I've heard this before. I tell them since it's the owner delivering I'll talk to him when he gets here.

The new owner arrived at my place at 1240, a full 5 hours after my initial order. Proceeded to make every excuse in the book(oven died, new order taker, no delivery drivers, being too busy, new to the chinese food business), not taking any responsibility for how poorly they communicated and their terrible speed of service.

Then he proceeds to take out the 70 dollars of food I ordered at 5 hours before, that I was told had been sitting there since 10pm like I still was interested in that order. I had since driven to mcdonalds to feed the kids and the wife went to bed out of frustration.

So, after I tell him I am no longer interested in the food, he offers it to me for half off to make up for the experience. I told him, the whole thing had definitely soured my opinion of them and they most likely lost a customer. However, I agreed to pay half and whether I came back or left a review on the experience would depend on the quality of the food.

Sadly, my food was clearly sitting around for hours, smaller portions that usual, nowhere near the usual taste/quality and the chicken balls had about 1/4 of the usual amount of chicken, they were almost all breading. Also, my wife has a mushroom allergy, which was never an issue with the old owners(we order no mushrooms in everything to make it easy). We had mushrooms in everything despite being assured the owner made it and there were no mushrooms.

Overall, it was a very sad night for me.. I was hungry all night AND lost my favourite chinese food place since I was a child and we would order on new years. The owner was very nice and told me to let him know the next time I ordered so he could make it up to me, but I haven't ordered for fear of another bad...

DISGUSTING! Was really craving Chinese food and we used to order from Pagoda (but it's been a few years) so I thought I'd give it a try again. Honestly that will be my last. Ordered Dinner for 2B deluxe, General Tsos chicken and Pagoda special fried noodles. The egg rolls were super greasy, the fried rice tasted stale and the sweet n sour sauce was, I don't even know how to describe it. The chicken or lack there of in the general tsos was just fried pieces of breading if there was chicken in it I would be very surprised (also my fault but I thought I ordered something else and didn't particularly like the flavour of it so beside the lack of chicken I can't really complain because it wasn't what I thought it was) the Pagoda fried noodles were probably the only decent thing and the majority of it was super caramelized like black because it was cooked too long. Honestly I just wasted almost $70 on a barely edible meal that I was really looking forward too and was...

This place deserves zero stars. Meant to order from the Pagoda on the mountain and accidentally ordered from here instead. Literally the worst Chinese Food I’ve ever had. Every food item tasted the same - bland and a horrible aftertaste. S&S Chicken balls and S&S shrimp were over cooked, super greasy and way too much batter. The S&S sauce was watery and tasted off. BBQ pork slices were so dry, they were almost impossible to swallow. Rice was hard. Noodles were bland. The only thing that tasted good was the soy sauce packets. Anyone rating this restaurant with anything above a zero clearly lost their sense of taste from Covid, because there’s no way anyone finds the food palatable here. It may be too soon to tell, but I won’t be even be surprised if we all get food poisoning. Just awful. $160 in food down the toilet. Definitely won’t be enjoying...