Rom pho Barbecue Buffet — Restaurant in Pattaya City

If you had asked me to review this place earlier I had probably given them 4 or 5 stars. Today, when we should start to take food several of the trays was empty. When we asked the staff to refill they pointed to a clock hanging over the shrimps and said they can only refill every 10 minutes. I had to wait 7 minutes for them to start refill. I waited next to the shrimps. They refilled with 20 shrimps that had big heads and tiny tails. We were two person so we took 8 shrimps total, leaving 12 pieces for the 100-150 other customers. However, it isn´t unusually to see people take a lot of shrimps so it means that you can end up waiting forever to get any. It wasn´t only shrimps that was empty but several meat trays as well. If we hadn´t started to put food on our plates we had left emidiatly and we regret that we didn´t. If the owner choose this system we as customers should be informed about it when entering the restaurant. Everyone choose what they want to do but at least we can´t support a business acting like this. I haven´t seen this clock hanging over the shrimps at earlier visits and I looked on old photos and I can´t see the clock in them. I have never experienced this system at a Thai barbecue restaurant earlier and I have visit many all over Thailand. It makes you wounder if the owner are Thai or from another country where this kind of behavior is more common?

Today (never happened earlier) we had to ask for the check three times and it took 15 minutes to pay. We could understand it if the restaurant was bussy but at this time it was maybe a total of 50 customers left and around 20 staff vissible. Yes, some staff manage the charcoal and some clean but even the manager (white shirt, walkie talkie) refused to give us the check. I had to demand that she took the money but she didn´t give us the change. She choosed to wait for the staff that "had" our table I guess. If the "right" staff is gone for 15 minutes (break, toilet, other work) there has to be someone else that actually can take the payment.

A few words about the food. A Thai barbecue isn´t a fancy dinner with high quality meat but here they cut some of the meat in bigger pieces making it harder to grill and tougher to eat. They also leave a lot of skinn on the chicken compared to other places. Nothing I had written a review about normally but now when we write an review we can add this as well.

This was NOT our first visit but DEFINTLY THE LAST. Sad, because the restaurant also have some good sides but..... It isn´t the last visit due to that we had to wait to pay and not because of the low quality of some food. The moment the owner instructed the staff to not refill food when it become empty but to wait until every 10 minutes so new customers that just arrived can´t get food, that´s the moment he also asked us to stop supporting his business.

The owner has the right to do what ever he want and lucky for us we have the same right. There are over 100 other Thai barbecue restaurants in town that minimum keep the same standard or better and to the same...

The buffet price is 290 baht per person which at the beginning sound reasonable. Once we started our dinner (we got 9 pax), found out that all the foods are frozen and didnt defrost properly yet. Imagine the squid or cuttlefish still have a block of ice stick to it. One of the reason we chose the place was because of the choice of meats and seafood but both are truly disappointing. The prawn and crab are deep frozen and not really fresh at all. The taste is just not appealing and textures is squishy feeling. The worse is the beef meats, when we try grills it or boils it (this is mookata), the meat turn out weird and kind of chewy feeling. Felt like it use way too much tenderizer on the meat. So hard to chew and eat it. We put it aside as it tough to continuing eating it but the staff appoach us and said that we are wasting foods which this is not the case. Tried to explain the foods taste weird but they didnt accept it. They decide to charge us for wastage of the foods as we have no choice but to accept it. We decided to just pay for it and avoid further confrontation as they dont really care about customer feedback and not in tune for services at all. The worse is the manager have to guts to ask if we are chinese. What the heck nationality got to do with the foods taste and courteous services from the restaurant. My recommendations is to avoid this restaurant to avoid disappointment and there are plenty of other restaurants that offer better choice and even...

I visited this buffet recently. The price is 300 THB per person, and they have a rule that if you leave food on your plate, they weigh the leftovers and charge you extra based on how many grams you didn’t eat. I agreed to this because I was hungry, and at first, the food selection looked decent. I found a few dishes I liked — the Pad Thai was quite tasty.

However, I noticed a major issue with hygiene: there were flies everywhere around the food. While they did try to use electric fly traps or fans, it didn’t help much. Maybe they should install some mesh barriers to protect the food better.

Another thing that really bothered me was the waiter’s behavior. I ordered just water (drinks are not included), and the waiter kept refilling my glass — not once or twice, but at least five times — even when my glass was already full. It became uncomfortable. I couldn’t relax or eat at my own pace because the staff kept hovering around my table. Meanwhile, used napkins were piling up around me, and no one bothered to clean them up.

At first, I thought they were just being attentive, but it started to feel like they were trying to make me full by constantly refilling my glass — maybe to prevent me from going back for more food. It gave me the impression that customers were being watched, and the staff was doing everything possible to limit how much we eat.

In the end, I didn’t enjoy the experience at all. It felt more like I was being managed than served. I...