JOY WOK Super Buffet - Overland Park — Restaurant in Overland Park

Honestly I cannot believe how dramatically this superbuffet went down with quality in foods. My family and I came in around 7:30pm today on a Sunday night, 95% of the foods was gone and nothing was refilled unless asked several times. I mean 2 hrs before closing with plenty of customers dining in and paying over $30 before tax and drinks. This type of buffet should only average around $5 per person. Crab legs was CRAZILY SALTY regardless if it was new or Not. I understand being the only All you can eat Crablegs buffet, doesn't quality have to be so horrible. Sadly after Covid, only Joywok serves all you can eat seafood since all casinos shut down their buffets. Crawfish dish only had claws left and it too was super SALTY and come with a foul smell. Fried shrimp was stale and dried up. Everything, literally I mean EVERYTHING was overly SALTY, like as if the only seasoning used was Inifinity amount of salt. Everything was dried and overcooked as if it was recooked from leftovers. Food quality was way better before Covid, now with under new management the food quality dramatically went downhill. Honestly left the restaurant feeling hungry due to unable to eat anything and spent closed to $200 with tips for 4 people. With this amount I rather take my family somewhere else nicer with better quality foods. Not to say, we all went home hungry and diarrhea nonstop. Seems like everytime we go to Joy Wok, we experience diarrhea afterwards. Today I witness one of the sushi chef just dump a bag of raw Mussels out to serve customers and did not even wash it before serving. This is disgusting and unsanitary. I can't imagine with all the other foods being cook behind the kitchen, bet it's very filthy and unsanitary. I recommend everyone please go somewhere else to dine in unless you enjoy the aftermath of diarrhea, basically paying to screw up our stomach. I wished I could have taken some pictures of the food quality but didn't get a chance too. I'm sure many others experience the same before. Just FYI, Takeout is priced at $30 before tax per box not by pounds like other surrounding buffets. So it is quite expensive if anyone was thinking of just grabbing some to go rather dine in. Please make sure eat at your own risk and do realize Medical bills cost more, so it is not worth it. Since reopen, my family, friends and I been going couple times but "EVERYONE" comes home nauseated and nonstop diarrhea. This happens everytime...

We did a small search online for a place that served crab legs, only to discover after arriving that they don't serve them on Fridays. That's the only reason we chose Joy Wok - they really should make that information clear! As others have stated, a huge portion of their services are shut down, but the prices are still high. When we first arrived, the music was blaring so loud we could hardly hear each other speak in our little party of 5. To their credit, when I asked the gentleman at the front counter to turn it down, he did so immediately, and it didn't come back up. Our server was likewise very friendly, although sadly she couldn't understand half of what we said, asked us to repeat our drink order 3 times, and still got my water with lemon wrong - she almost brought me soda instead, and when she finally brought my water, there was no lemon in it. She took a good 15 minutes to even show up to take our drink orders in the first place, and then two of us spent the majority of the meal with empty glasses because she took so long to show up with refills. She checked on our table twice in the roughly 2 hours we sat there. On to the food...limited meat options, limited vegetable options, the ice cream machine was leaking all over the floor, with 3 wait staff members standing nearby and no one moving to clean it up. My sister in law ate the peel and eat shrimp and there was so much sand in it her teeth were hurting from eating it, and the ice had melted from under it. Half the food I ate was lukewarm and tasted like it'd sat there for hours, and we came at dinner time. My man stood for about 10 minutes waiting in the lobby before anyone offered to seat us. They even seated someone who came in after us before asking. We used the salt shaker and soy sauce, both of which were crusted and sticky with residue from no one cleaning them for what we believe is the space of weeks' worth of dining. During a pandemic. On the bright side, the egg drop soup was superb. The bathrooms were fairly dirty. The koi pond was lovely, as was the fountain, and we enjoyed feeding the fish, but we felt sorry for the poor turtles that were trying to climb up the walls, presumably because they were so hungry due to the fish snatching up the food before they could get to it. We will not...

After eating numerous times at their old location about a mile to the north I was looking forward to visiting the new location. Even waiting a few weeks after they finally opened to hopefully let the crowd thin out a bit it was still pretty busy the 3 times I ate here, twice for Friday lunch and once for Saturday lunch.

Overall the service & food I had were fairly good, although a couple of the dishes I enjoyed at their old location, jalapeño chicken and house special pork, are now very oily, so much so that they upset my stomach a bit. In particular I enjoyed the General's Chicken due to the sauce: not too sweet and with a very good ginger flavor and a surprising amount of heat/spice (which is great for me because I love spicy food and am usually disappointed with the relative blandness of other buffets' sauce). It is also great they have kimchi available. However one star comes off for the overly oily dishes.

One more star comes off because their first post-opening inspection chalked up 9 health code violations. As long as they have been in the buffet business and now in a newly remodeled space you would think this wouldn't happen, e.g., their person in charge shouldn't need multiple explanations from the inspector about time and temperature. Fortunately none of the violations directly involved the hot foods which is what I almost entirely stick to eating. I'll probably not return here for a while until there are some better inspection results as buffets are already considered high risk even with no violations.

Update -- I have eaten here a number of times since last year's review. The food quality has stayed pretty high, although the same dishes are still pretty oily most of the time. The inspection reports are a bit better, so I'll bump up my rating to 4...