Serena Restaurant — Restaurant in Rogers Park Township

My Family Hosted an Event here last night , where they went a couple days earlier and spoke to 1 of the owners sons. They made an agreement with them that their Number of Guests can fluctuate depending on who shows up and they agreed to accommodate the day of. Last Night the Owners Wife and Other son created a Scene in disagreement when 10( from a party of 43 originally) of our Guests didn't show up , after their other son agreed 2 days earlier to accommodate for such a situation , We understand they have a business to run so we asked them to meet us halfway, which they said NO to and wanted to charge us for everyone , even the 10 guests who didn't eat. Then we said ok fine you can charge but can you maybe pack us a little food for the guests who didn't come BUT WE ARE PAYING FOR , and we can just drop them their food off, they were adamant and NO abt it for the next 20 -30 mins. In the End , I told my dad to just pay and call it a day , they will just never have our business again. Then they start disagreeing at price, the younger brother has to call the older one and make sure is this the price you agreed at asking him on the phone " are you sure " 10 times. My Parents are very generous people, this Restaurant took almost $200 more than they should have , which my parents would have paid in Tip anyways if these owners met us halfway. I have had a ton of events at Serena before and the owners Husband had always been very accommodating, but the experience we had yesterday with his wife and other son was so so horrible, no matter how much I appreciated their fresh and warm food , I had a horrible Service experience. Restaurants being a service Industry ,this is very important to us, I am so enraged that my parents didn't take their conversation in writing bcoz they trusted the owners kid, It feels like BAIT AND SWITCH to us and We will Never go back to Serena again from our...

Updated Review 8/9/2025 We tried Serena buffet again after a very long time. We were pleasantly surprised with their improvements on the weekend AYCE buffet.

All the food is delicious, authentic and fresh! They offer so many choices; nihari, paya, Haleem, chicken chapli & boti kabobs, chicken biryani, goat pilau, puri halwa and several veggie dishes.

The naans and puris are served fresh made hot to the table compared to the other buffet places where they are cooked and jumbled up in a big pile on the buffet! This buffet offers everything you want! Hot, fresh, neat and clean surroundings too.

Mango and plain lassis along with hot tea made with real milk! We liked that the Mali kheer desert was the real deal and a delicious ending to a perfect meal! ————————————————— Serena Restaurant moved its location and is not that far down the street. It’s closer to all the other shops now. The AYCE buffet is $20 and offers a lot of specialty meat dishes including chicken tikka and chapli kabob, goat piye (stew like dish eaten with roti), chicken biryani, beef nihari, beef keema, goat pilau and a bunch of vegetable dishes along with puri halwa. It also included mango and plain lassi, tea and desert.

Food was ok but the stars of the buffet were the chicken tikka and the beef nihari. It’s a good variety of food for the price and they did a good job keeping all the items replenished. They are open til 4pm for the buffet where others only go til 3pm.

Mango and plain lassi’s were pretty good. The tea at the end of the meal was almost empty (it’s self serve) and didn’t taste like desi chai. I think because it had been sitting in the warmer too long and it really needed a...

I love good food and am always careful about what I eat. Taste and quality are really important to me. For the past 10 years, whenever I visited Chicago, I always went to the same Indian-Pakistani buffet downtown. It was consistently great, and I always left happy and stuffed.

Recently, I moved to the north side of Chicago and decided to check out a close by to home, new buffet that charged $20 #Serena Restaurant. Big mistake. The food was a disaster—cold, tasteless, and just plain gross. Normally, I go for the meat dishes when eating outside, but I had to rely mostly on vegetarian options as safer bet. The dal was the only thing remotely edible, but even that was just okay. The peas and potato curry had a lake of oil in their center, and it was really off-putting. The dessert, some kind of colored halwa, was so bad I couldn’t even finish it, and I hate wasting food. A lot of color in everything (color cause cancer-fyi readers)

To top it off, the buffet actually cost $22, not the $20 they advertised. If you only had enough cash, you’d be short. The whole experience was just awful.

In the end, I’ve decided it’s not worth the trouble. I’d rather drive an extra 40 minutes to my favorite downtown buffet than ever go back to Devon. So, goodbye to your cold, greasy, and tasteless $22 buffet. I won’t be coming back. #Buffet...