China Garden Buffet — Restaurant in Riverside

So this happened some years back, but I decided to tell my story finally! I’m older now and I feel like my opinion does matter my voice should be heard in regards to This absolutely horrible restaurant for lack of a better term . I am the mother of five children we used to eat out on a regular basis. My children are all two and three years apart prior to me taking my entire family to this restaurant. FYI, all my children were under the age of 12!! I used to go there because I used to work at AutoZone and for lunch at least once a week my coworkers and I would go eat here. So I brag to my husband about how good this restaurant was, however, when I finally did take my family, which was a total of seven of us two adults and five children we were treated rudely disrespectful and had an horrible horrible experience of Service & food.. As soon as we entered the restaurant, some of the waiters and waitresses looked up and had frowns on their faces. Once we were seated my three daughters and I decided to go to the bathroom and wash our hands so that we could start eating immediately. We were going to do the buffet when we went into the bathroom a tall Asian woman that worked there abruptly open up the bathroom and pressed a trashcan up against the door loudly, looking at us as though we were Unfit to be there or would steal something 🤦‍♀️! I ignored this and went to the table, anyway upon arriving at the table my sons and husband were ready to eat. They had already went to the bathroom. The waiter came over and demanded their ages immediately at which time I told them their ages. They wrote them down and then started watching us. We each grabbed a plate from the front buffet area and started to get food upon arriving back at our table, my youngest daughter who had chose sweet-and-sour chicken Ate a few bites and immediately told me she wasn’t feeling well. My husband said it looks like this food has been sitting out all day. I requested the waiter to come over and if possible, bring out fresh food. They immediately got an attitude at which time my husband said we are not going to stay here. I told them that we would pay for the drinks, but that we were not gonna pay for the food because we hadn’t eaten any except for my Youngest daughter. They called the manager over immediately. The manager said I’m going to call the police on you !! you are trying to steal. I couldn’t believe the rudeness the utter nasty demeanors of the waiter and waitresses!! the overall vibe, aura was absolutely disgusting. Needless to say we never returned. It’s been over 10 years every time I drive pass this establishment! I am constantly reminded of our horrible humiliating and disgraceful experience . If I could give this zero stars I would but because it’s only one through five stars I am giving it a Negative one star. This is not a good place to eat, and to be quite frankly, I would not be surprised if the health department hasn’t been called numerous times the food was old cold and was still being sold. apparently, their ideas of customer service reflect the country that they are from and not what is done here we ended up paying $80 for a meal we didn’t eat and my daughter threw up in the parking lot and on the way home I recommend never going here and if you do, pray over everything who knows you might get sick and not even realize it until much later. If they could put cameras in kitchens in restaurants, I would think majority of the paying customers would leave immediately or never come back Or even step in to this joke of an establishment. They are dishonest, And completely disrespectful. I went ahead, of course, and paid the $80 for our non-service however, I know in the back of my head what goes around comes around you cannot do people in and expect to prosper. Kindness doesn’t cost anything in fact it creates wealth Mentally and physically.. I am human. My family is human. I wasn’t requesting anything out of the ordinary, just decency, respect, and understanding of which I...

I went with my two little ones to China Garden Buffet on 1/26/25, and we dined in for their dinner buffet. We were immediately seated and served our drinks. The kids got their drinks in styrofoam cups but mine was in a plastic cup. The drink tasted as if it was (the cup) not properly cleaned between uses and had a dishwasher sanitizer/soap aftertaste. Great start already. Then we went up to get food; we got rice, lo mein, chicken teriyaki skewers , general tso’s, egg rolls, crab Rangoon, and sweet and sour chicken. I’ll just go through each item. The fried rice was undercooked and crunchy, basically inedible unless you enjoy crunchy rice. The egg rolls were so unbelievably greasy, getting as much grease as I could out soaked two entire napkins with grease, for just a SINGLE egg roll. Immediate pass for me. Lo mein was mediocre, at best. Completely bland and the noodles were drenched in some sort of weird liquid mixture, not your typical lo mein. The crab Rangoon was quite possibly the worst, and I have been to a lot of Chinese restaurants in my day, crab Rangoon I have ever tasted. Just tasted like unflavored cream cheese in a shell and almost had a rotten flavor and again, soaked in large amounts of grease. Now for the “best part”. My children had the sweet n sour chicken, and I had the chicken teriyaki skewer and general tso’s. When I say had, I mean put it on our plates, as none of us ate any at all. Not sure if this place just does not understand how to cook chicken properly, but EVERY SINGLE chicken dish we had was pink and RAW. Chicken skewer was burnt on the outside, squishy pink and raw on the inside. General tso’s had at least a 200% DV of added sugar from whatever monstrosity of a sauce they coated the raw chicken in, and my kids couldn’t even eat their sweet and sour chicken, as again, it was RAW. My kids did enjoy the soft-serve ice cream, but the staff had to put no effort into making that good with the machine. Unpleasantly got my check. $38 for 1 adult, a 3 year old and a 2 year old and I’m the only one who got a drink that wasn’t water. Outrageous pricing for a Chinese buffet in any atmosphere. The waitress takes my card, cashes me out, and then as we go to leave some worker tells me that I need to pay and to go up to the front. I was confused but went up regardless. Spoke to the “manager” and he said I never paid. I showed him my Wright-Patt transactions and the check amount was already pending to come out of my account, I had to argue with this guy for over 10 minutes while my children are impatiently running around causing a ruckus, before I finally gave up and just gave them my card a second time (which my WPCU account now shows 2 transactions for them). So I get to have fun trying to explain to Wright Patt about this whole fiasco. Long story short, staff wasn’t awful but would almost follow you around and watch you like a hawk when you went to got food, just about none of the food we tried was even edible, much less good, they charge an arm and a leg for a Chinese buffet (multiple other buffets in the Dayton area come to about $25 for the three of us, with much better food I may add) and they don’t advertise their buffet prices anywhere in the restaurant so really they can just charge whatever they want and get away with it, and they tried to scam me into paying almost $80 total for 1 adult and two toddlers. This was our first time coming here, and hopefully I just came in on a bad day, but it will definitely be the last...

The food is meh. The hot and sour soup was luke warm.

My son and I went Saturday at 330 for the dinner/ crab legs. I'd forgotten how uncomfortable that time is in this particular restaurant, because they bring one pan of the crab legs out about 3:30 for the dinner crowd but there are still lunch time people there eating.

It gets hostile very fast. These Asian ladies start raising their voices and attacking patrons at tables and talking about them in Chinese.

Every. time. I watched as this little Asian girl went table to table asking people if they were eating dinner because they had picked up crab legs.

One table by us said no and suggested she take away the plate of crab legs they just sat down with.. which she did and then she threw them in the garbage.

Another table with a Hispanic family didn't seem to speak English and they didn't understand what she said...which seemed to cause her to flip into hyper vigilance mode as if speaking louder and pointing to the crab legs on the table might win the battle.

It was, a lot.

I totally understand they don't want people paying $8 for a lunch and getting the $16 crab leg dinner option... And the location of this place suggests they probably get a lot of people trying to do just that. (Dense population..very busy area, people eating all day long...)

The crab legs are the only addition to the buffet after 3:30... But there has to be a better way to do that.. maybe seat diners for dinner in a different reserved part of the restaurant? I don't know but it's a very hostile and accusatory 10 minutes from 330 to 340 the way it works now.

They go through all the effort of protecting those crab legs and yet we were there for an hour and a half after waiting for them to bring out crab legs the first time...in that time they only brought out three pans total... So even if you paid full price for the dinner so you could get crab legs most people couldn't even get them without waiting a long time. I didn't see them offer those diners the lunch price when only lunch items were available.🤷

I feel bad for these women. They seem overworked and under appreciated. But I won't go back again (said that two years ago after my last last trip 🙄).

The irony....I don't even eat crab...