Golden Corral Buffet & Grill — Restaurant in Four Corners States

I've been gone for a year, out of the country. When I came back to Prescott, I was looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with Golden Corral. It has been a guilty pleasure for several years, now.

I am disappointed. Not completely, but I'm not nearly as happy as I have been in the past.

The fried chicken used to be inviting and tasty looking. This time it looked flat, lifeless and dry. I almost skipped it. It tasted okay, but not nearly as good as before. Seems like a new recipe uses a thin, lifeless batter. Not nearly as special as it used to be.

The fried fish was my biggest disappointment, though. It used to have this golden crispy batter that had great flavor. The fish was light and flaky inside a tasty batter shell. Loved it.

Tonight, though, the batter seems to have been replaced by a sort of breadcrumb coating that had little crisp to it, and even less flavor. The old version was one of my main draws; a reason for going to Golden Corral all on its own. I would never go back for the new one, though. Dull and boring by comparison.

The final disappointment was the steak.

People chew on meat and dogs gnaw on bones. Tonight, Wed. Oct 21, 2020, I had to gnaw on my steak to eat it.

Tough.

Tasty but tough.

Had to saw through it to cut off a bite-sized piece, then had to gnaw through it to get it ready to swallow.

Gnaw, not chew.

It just felt like for the same price as I've paid in the past, I'm being asked to settle for less. Not less quantity, but less quality.

It almost feels like it may be under new management, and the new manager can't recognize that what was being done before... was...

We come here a couple times per year. We were there at 4:40pm and had a 10 minute wait in line. There isn't much room for the line so we spent the first part of our wait outside in the cold.

The pricing for all you can eat is usually ok, this time it was far too pricey for what we ended up getting.

I was disappointed in the steaks they were serving. The chef didn't seem to know what medium rare means. The so called stakes were about the size of silver dollars. They were more fat than meat. The chef was not a pleasant man which made me not want to go back or ask for a better steak. I guess that is a business model.

The server was polite. The guy at the register has such a soft voice that it was hard to hear him.

The salad bar was well stocked and fresh. We put together a wonderful salad from the ingredients available.

As the restaurant got busy the meat counter and the desert counter had a hard time catching up after they got behind. It didn't seem that busy. Evidently it's a management/staffing problem.

The peach cobbler had the taste of rancid oil. When we told our server she said "Thank-you, if no one tells us, we never know" but she never did anything about it. An hour later it was still the rancid stuff.

This wasn't their best night for us. It was not worth the money this time. Anyways, Hopefully your experience is better. In the meantime we will have to decide if we want to risk our hard earned money and our appetites by...

Usually I love Golden corral but since the new changes during this time of the pandemic their food quality I feel has gone down now when it comes to cleanliness it is definitely gone up and the employees that I ran into were very polite but they looked shorthanded like somebody was trying to save money on labor for profit but it look like they're running a skeleton crew and the employees were running around all over the place to cover all areas... If I had to guess I would say they were short at least six employees that they needed to properly run this restaurant... It was just kind of disappointing because I love coming there for the variety of different foods and plenty of it but even then it seems like they shortened the menu also... The last dinner I went to 3 weeks ago the price I paid was approximately $16.99 per person and if you bought a drink it was like $3.59 approximately... So all in all you're spending $21 to sit down and basically get a variety of different foods to eat which is kind of pricey especially in this area... All in all the visit was okay but until things change to the better or back to what it was I think I'm only going to visit maybe six or seven times a year until I see improvement with the food temp and more employees... Because honestly seeing all these workers just really hustling to get things done... It was actually giving me an anxiety attack and was not comfortable like it...