Sam Cha — Restaurant in Montreal

Dined here for the first time with my family (4) on Monday, September 4th and picked the all-you-can-eat option.

The appetizers that are included tasted good (radish and salad), though the kimchi was a little too sour for my personal taste. They offer a wide variety of meats that were all delicious, as they were lean (not too fatty) and nicely marinated.

We also ordered a cold noodle dish from the à la carte menu, which i found was on the simpler side in terms of ingredients- it could’ve been better had it contained a little more than just half an egg, two types of veg and noodles (i loved how they were the perfect “level” of chewy).

Moreover, I tried their drink called the “I.D.H” (an iced cocktail with pear juice and soju), and it tasted amazing. And if they offered the choice to add tapioca pearls, it would’ve been a one hell of game changer.

In terms of the service, we arrived at around 5:15pm and were thankfully seated immediately. The workers were nice and brought out the BBQ equipment + dishes fairly quickly for the first round, however the pace naturally slowed down as the restaurant got busier.

One thing, however, that I did not quite appreciate about the experience is how the waiters/waitress did not check up on our table as frequently as they should- this lead to empty dishes pilling up (leaving us little to no table space, as the grill took up a great majority of it) and the water refills were lacking to say the least. In order to be served (ex: order more dishes), we had to either get up from our tables and walk up to the front desk, or raise our hand for at least 5 minutes- to no avail 2 out of 3 times. Mind you, I was staring at the waiters as they just stood around the front desk (not serving anyone).

I understand that most customers opt for the à la carte option (which makes the servers’ job simpler), however it should be common knowledge that the all-you-can-eat option requires more check-ins; the reason being that there are likely multiple rounds of orders and hence, more dishes to be taken care of.

All in all, I would come back -for the food- and order from the à la carte as a change for a, hopefully, improved experience in regards to...

This review is for the AYCE option.

To begin with, there was a not-so-long waitlist to get in on a Saturday night at 9pm. We were seated about 30 mins after.

The issue here is the food and service. When we were seated, the waiter left us pretty clueless. It was only after about 10 minutes that we realized that to see the menu, we had to scan a QR code on the table. The issue is that we were seated on their bench options on one end, the little QR code paper is on the opposite end, laid on the table, barely visible for us to see.

When the waiter finally did come back a while later, we gave him our choice. We picked the all you can eat (AYCE) option. This option sucks. What you see on the picture of the menu, looks nothing like what you get. The grill is covered in aluminum foil. I assume this is to make it easier for them to clean? The issue with this, is that you can't get a proper sear with your meats. By the time you do get a sear, the meat is already overcooked. Secondly, the meats and sides don't look like anything that they serve you. Then, other than the beef rib, everything else was very bland. The spicy chicken was not spicy at all, and lacked flavour overall, it was our least favourite. The sides were radish and kimchi. The radish was good, our first serving of kimchi was delicious, but the second one barely had any flavour. Very inconsistent. For the service, when we would ask for refills of the meats and sides, it would take absolutely forever. We even had to ask twice for them to refill our sides because they forgot. Mind you, there was barely anybody in this part of the resto. I had asked for more rice too, it took them 12 minutes to bring another bowl of rice. Not sure why this took so long. By the end of the evening, our waiter was nowhere to be seen and never really checked on us, unless we waived him down. We wanted ice cream, but he didn't even offer it to us.

Overall bad experience. I'm not sure how it would've been if we just did à la carte, but our AYCE experience was not great. If you're looking for AYCE, try to find other options such as Gyubee on the same street. Otherwise, just...

To me this is what is considered an extremely dirty restaurant. I think that some tables and the kitchen are way too close to the bathrooms. I’ll take this moment to focus mainly on the bathrooms: it is extremely dirty in my opinion. This may give you an idea of how bad one might think it is: my mom currently has an urinal infection and she was the only person in the family to have used a bathroom of the restaurant (no other public bathroom was used from another/ different establishment). She is currently in the hospital for medical complications. Her infection basically went to her kidneys and she’s in extreme pain right now. We suspect that the state of the bathrooms of Sam Cha have something (or everything) to do with my mom’s current health issues which is such a shame especially after paying almost 150$ for what felt like an underwhelming culinary experience. I do think the food is average at best and almost every dish we ordered lacked flavour, now I unfortunately believe that the food is even more lacking in the hygiene department!

Edit after owner’s response: I sent a message via email to who seems to be the owner or part of the ownership of Sam Cha a few minutes after they suggested to do so. That was on the 19th of September. Today is the 24th of September and I still haven’t received a response via email. Almost 5 days of silence… My mom just got out of the hospital with a long list of medications prescribed to her in case you were wondering! To me it is obvious that this business and the team working there could not care less about their clients and their wellbeing, I really do not recommend to eat here, save yourself and go eat...