May Gold Village — Restaurant in Langford

This resto is earning the rare 1 star.

While I did pay for what was presented on the plate, I shouldn't have.

I have had this place on my list of places to visit for the past 4 years since moving to the island.

Today was the day and I was under the impression from their website and some of the photos in the reviews that this would be a buffet experience. IT IS NOT. The buffet is still right there when you walked in, but now it doubles as a plate storage unit. Yellow flag one.

Once seated by myself at a 4 top, I was given a menu. They have some pre-arranged lunch options for $15. Reasonable and good generic selections. No different than you would expect from a comparable food court set of selections.

Food came out pretty quick.

When the plate was placed on the table next to me, not in front of me. Weird.

I started with a portion of the "chow mein". Noodles were completely bland. No flavour. As I started working towards a few more bites, I noted that the sprout heads had turned completely gray and the tips of their stems too were turning gray. They looked spoiled to me!

Next, I tried the "ginger beef". What a weird experience. First, these were flat rectangular slices of beef, not the traditional stir fry long shape. The top few bits had no sauce, and the bottom ones were bathing in sauce. I tried the first one. Bang! Massive vinegar taste. I stirred them up and tried 4 or 5 more pieces. But the vinegar was overpowering.

Next I moved on to the deep fried spring roll. I could tell by the neat, uniform binding of the rolls they were made outside and brought in. Hope. I broke it in half. Good snap. But. The carrot that dangled out from one piece seemed odd. I pulled it out with my finger. But it was mush. The whole thing was mush inside. I regretfully took a small bite of the one piece. Mush. And, I could also taste that distinctive "been in a dirty freezer too long" taste. Done with that.

I broke one of the shrimps in half. It looked alright, so I tried a bite of the shrimp by itself. Success. Something that wasn't gross. I tried a second, this time dipping it in the sweet and sour sauce in the small dish. Not too bad. I was attentive to look for any "dirty oil" taste in the fry batter, but it tasted surprisingly clean. I finished the shrimp.

I poked at a few other things and stirred a few things over just in case. Bad move. I ended up finding several bits of that black curled up chunks. Because why use a clean grill when a dirty one is just as good.

Ugh. What a depressing thing.

I tapped out and went to the till to pay. I asked the girl who took my payment if she was an owner. She said no, so I didn't want to berate her over things not in her control. I asked if I could talk to an owner or manager. She got immediately defensive and asked why. I told her the food was not good at all. She wanted to know more, so I said that the spring roll was clearly frozen in the freezer for way too long. She started making excuses about how they don't store anything for more than a couple days because they get deliveries every two or three days. I told her that is a lie.

At that point, I left. A couple were looking over a menu when I was leaving. I told them to go anywhere else. And now, I am...

We are Chinese food junkies, absolutely looooove good Chinese food. In fact when we travel, 9/10 we will try the Chinese food in that town. Now what is better than just Chinese food? A Chinese food BUFFET!

But not in this case. We went to Mays Gold Village Chinese Buffet last night, located on the corner of Vetrans Memorial and Goldstream Avenue. We were really looking forward to it as we have driven by many times and the big bright signage always catches our eye. Parking lot is great, lots of spots and easy to get to from Goldstream Ave.

Upon entering at 8:30pm the staff was already mopping the floors although they don't actually close until 9pm. So this right there for us is a total turn-off. If your restaurant is open till 9pm, then be open till 9pm. It is very uninviting for a customer to come in and the staff is clearly getting ready to go home for the night. And not just that, nobody stopped cleaning when we came in. The floor was a little slippery under my boots so of course that is never a good idea...

The food selection was mostly deep fried entrees such as salt and pepper squid, sweet & sour pork, egg rolls ect... For the most part it was classic Chinese food. There were a couple of veggie dishes. But of course there were barely anything left in the containers due to the early clean up and what was there was super dry and uninviting. We almost left but we were hungry and we were there.

Shortly after we got our plates about 8 more people came in so at that point the fresh food began to make its way out. Too late for us unfortunately.

The sweet & sour pork was the highlight for us, it was pretty tasty. The chowmein was greasy and the egg rolls were too sweet (we suggest they go to veggie egg rolls instead of fruit.) The won-ton soup was pretty good but the sushi was tasteless even with wasabi on it, which was odd. The ginger was never replenished during our visit. The desserts looked sparce and picked over so we didn't even bother.

It was an okay dinner out but not likely a Chinese food establishment we will visit again. For the price it wasn't a great value.We were given a 10% discount at the till, which for the 2 of us, brought it down to $35. The server recognized that we didn't have much selection and took it upon herself to say so and apply the discount. That was appreciated and nice of her as we aren't typically complainers.

We have given Mays Gold Village 2 stars but it's more 2.5. 3 is just too much of a stretch. Maybe it would be better earlier in the day... But we likely...

If you're looking for mediocre and greasy food at a high price, in a dirty establishment, then look no further.

After having driven by May Gold many times and pondering it as a dinner option, we finally broke down and tried it.

We arrived at dinner time and were seated quickly by a friendly waitress and invited to just proceed to the buffet.

The first challenge was finding a clean plate. Arriving at the plate rack, there was already a pile of 8 plates that were either cracked, chipped, or still had food from previous patrons stuck to them. I added about 4 more plates to the pile before I found one that was clean.

The food on the buffet was under stocked. We were in the middle of dinner rush and much of the bins were low or empty, showcasing a layer of grease at the bottom of the pans.

The restocking of the food was very slow, and just a pour over the top of the rest of the food, making me wonder how old the food and grease on the bottom was.

The food itself was ok, nothing award winning or special. I wasn't disappointed with the taste but it didn't make me want to jump up and get more. Some of the food was very old, especially the seafood (shrimp and calamari). This was concerning and we put them aside to try and avoid an unpleasant outcome.

The biggest surprise of the night was the bill. At $20 per person, it was much more than expected or worth. That's only $5 less than the BC Ferries buffet and no where near the quality or selection.

Finally, all of our party had stomach issues later that evening. Especially after we looked up the CRD health report on May Gold, where in Novembet 2018 they were threatened with a shutdown (wasn't there first bad report either). Yikes!

Next time we will travel to...