Asia Palace — Restaurant in Winnipeg

STRESSFUL AND EMBARRASSING CELEBRATION @ ASIA PALACE

I hosted my sons first birthday at Asia Palace on June 20. On June6 I called and confirmed that I have 125 guests coming. When we get there on June20, the day of the event, I gave them a heads up that I might have more people coming and told them 135 max, the guy said “Oh no worries, lots of seats and lots of food” so I was like good okay!

I booked the restaurant 6-9pm, 6:30pm my guests are hungry but the food are not ready yet, few minutes before 7pm, finally the buffet is ready, with just HALF OF THE TRAYS not full!

Atleast 50% of my guests are eating when I told them “Hey no more calamari, and the rice, noodles and some of the dishes are almost out” The guy said “Okay I will check”

10 minutes after I spoke to one of the staffs, we were completely out of calamari, rice, veggies, spring rolls, soup and noodles and a few left of some dishes. I told them again! He said “okay I will check”

I can see my guests eating like 1 piece of chicken and some sweet/sour pork. I was sooo embarrassed that they told me “There’s nothing else I can eat from the buffet”

It’s already past 8 when they put out some food like super little but my guests were starting to leave. Oh and they put out the calamari while we were packing up, and literally it was just me and my family left, for what? For your staffs to take home?

Saturday June 21, I called and spoke to the manager LIN coz I would like to complain and atleast get my deposit or tip back coz they don’t deserve that! He said, “I am sorry for what happened I was not there during your event, I was SICK” Okay what an excuse but I told him everything that happened.

He said that he noticed there were some bad reviews left on Google and their star went down, he offered $50 store credit on one condition “to take down one of my friends’ reviews” I said no! He again offered $100 store credit with a condition to take down all the bad reviews my friends gave them. Of course I said No! I want everyone to know what happened and how embarrassed we were.

First of all, IT IS NOT MY JOB to check the buffet station and let them know what we need. Second there was literally NO ONE, NO STAFF who checked on us. There were guys standing behind the counter and I asked for help but they refused and told me they don’t work there, so wth are you doing there?? Oh yah, he’s one of those guys who are pushing their promotion. These guys go to my guests asking to give them a five star review in exchange for a small size boba! No thank you! I can buy my own boba and give you 1 star, if possible no star at all!

He said that he would talk to the owner and will see what else he can do and he said to call me back the next day coz they’re busy. 2 days has passed and still no phone call so I decided to write this review. I gave them a chance and I waited. I was just so embarrassed coz my sister told me that 10-15 guests did not get to eat and you call that a “buffet” style dinner.

Oh one more thing, some of my friends have to wait for a table because 1 corner was occupied by their “staffs or promotion people” and the other side of the restaurant are for walk-ins and they were focused on that than my party. I can’t stress enough how humiliated we were. That was supposed to be a fun event but turned out to be a very...

As others have mentioned, the people in the kitchen seem to know what they're doing but the front of house staff are essentially nonexistent. There is no host or hostess to greet you at the door and take you to your table. The restaurant itself is dirty - I saw food smeared on one of the half-high walls between the buffet area and the perimeter, and lots of crumbs on the ground. This is especially confusing because we came at 5:00 pm, when staff should have had plenty of time after lunch rush to clean things up. The chairs at the tables are in need of repair, as most are peeling or torn. The servers seem to be poorly trained: they bring one dish at a time from the kitchen with no thought as to order or compatibility with other dishes, and they move at a snail's pace. Why do main dishes arrive without rice? Why are salad rolls and other appetizers arriving after the main course? Why don't the servers use trays? Why do they not check on your table even once throughout the experience? The number of servers on the floor was adequate to serve the customers that were present, but they were so inefficient that they fell behind rather quickly. Then after you're done eating it takes forever to get the bill and take-away containers. They were courteous and pleasant to deal with, but I'll take a curt server who's good at their job over a polite sloth any day of the week.

That's the bad. The good news is the food itself was expertly cooked and tasty. We had Buddha's delight, garlic Chinese eggplant, salad rolls, and red bean sesame balls, all of which were prepared perfectly, had nice clean-tasting sauces, were served in very generous portions, and were very reasonably priced. The south end of Winnipeg has some excellent Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants and Asia Palace is very competitive when it comes to food quality.

If they can get the front of house situation figured out, I would come back. For now, we'll continue to patronize North Garden...

Went here for an event that had an "all you can eat buffet." Food was very unremarkable, didn't make me sick so I guess that's something. But it goes downhill from here.

The experience right when we arrived was already horrible. The spacing is very cramped. Floor was very sticky. Half of the tables we had for the event weren't properly set. We had this event booked months in advanced and with the proper notice for a head count. You would think they would have made arrangements to have everything set and ready by the time people arrive. I understand that things happen, maybe it was very busy earlier. But the rude service we got from the servers was not appreciated. When we asked for cutlery for the table, the server just plopped them onto the table.

When the Buffet started they only have enough food for half of our party. People who haven't gotten food yet were still lining up, some of the trays of food were empty in the buffet. And the servers told us that they weren't going to refill the trays because they didn't want food to go to waste, when half of the party haven't even got their food. Unacceptable.

Eventually they did end up refilling only specific trays. By the time everyone finally got their food, there was only a little food left. When someone asked if they can take the leftovers food home, the server immediately told them "No". I later learned that they would charge $6 per takeout container if people wanted to take some food home. Which is pretty fair I guess, but why the reluctance to refill trays if they were going to charge for leftovers anyway.

tl;dr: This restaurant is very ill prepared to hold events for large parties. Customer service is horrible and the place is...