Sakura Buffet

This is an inexpensive buffet… don’t expect gourmet. It can be a nice place to «fill-​up», and they seem to have a good selection. (When the price is low –during the day for lunch– they don’t have as many choices as they do for dinner, such as shrimp and fish.)
When I’ve been there, they have been pretty good about tending to the buffet items and restocking items after they run out. They seem to have an abundance of choices such as Sushi and Habachi stuff… although it seems everyone goes for the buffet items.
Good Hearty food… at a reasonable price.
I saw a couple of over-​the-​top bad reviews. and I’m not sure what they were getting at. I guess if there is a time when they don’t keep up maintaining the buffet items (which I suppose can happen from time to time) then maybe you have a valid complaint. Otherwise a good place to stop by when you are really hungry! ;-)
Any questions, feel free to private message me.

I love this place! The service was wonderful, filled up my drinks right away. This place offers a huge selection from Chinese food, American food, to Japanese food! I love the sushi and the hibachi where you can actually see them prepared right in front of you ! The price is reasonable and the restaurant itself gives me a warm feeling. Again, I love this place! comes here every weekend!

After 6 years I’ve gone 4 times and the food still sucks. The restaurant looks nice. But the food seriously is bad. I think the buffet in Methuen and Lowell are much better.

AVOID this place at ALL costs. Seriously, if they gave the food away for FREE, I wouldn’t eat there. If I could give them ZERO stars, I would!
Previously this was C1 Buffet & I fully intend on changing my review to 1 star.
I will be calling the board of health on this nasty restaurant asap.
OK, so… all that out of the way. I go in with my son…$ 12.95 each & even though they have kid prices, they have a sign on the door stating the if your child is 5ft or over, they get charged adult rates. Stupid. But… my son is adult rate anyhow, so I didn’t care much about that.
To the food… or whatever was in the bins they like to call food. I wouldn’t serve it to my dog… if I had a dog.
The food… wow…just plain & simple, inedible. Every single thing I took a bite of was just downright NASTY! It was hard to bite through, cold, tasted weeks old & smelled like rotten cottage cheese.
Finally after about ten minutes of us both trying to find ONE thing to eat… I just flat out refused to try anything else.
I got up, went right to the front desk & stated…“your food is beyond disgusting, we’re leaving”. She then offers to cook us «something fresh» off of the menu.
Ummmm…something fresh??? Naaaaa, think we’ll pass, but thanks for the offer. Not!!!
We left without paying for a drop of it & then chewed a entire pack of gum for 30 minutes to get the after taste out.
Yea…don’t go here. Ever…
Nasty. Disgusting. Cold. Rotted. Food.
That’s all :):)

Visited here a few days ago and was sad to find that the food had suffered tremendously over the years… All of the food was very cold almost inedible! And don’t even get me started on the staff, I mean for starters the guy making the sushi didn’t even know what type he was making. It’s very upsetting I used to love this place. Your dead to me now.

Visited Sakura Buffet yesterday. Was brought to my seat by the restaurant manager, given utensils and asked what I wanted to drink. While this seems normal, it didn’t mention any other option than the BUFFET. So I went over to the Buffet and started choosing items.
What I didn’t realize was that almost all of the items on the steam tables were actually barely warm — or worse, cold. There were no open ended covers to keep the food hot — so what I tried all was mediocre at best. I tried the fried scallops which I felt tasted both cold and without any scallop taste at all.
So I asked for and received my bill, paid the waitress and went over to the Restaurant Manager to share my experience with her. She told me that she can’t get the steam table tray «covers» because the restaurant supply companies don’t carry them. I checked — that is NOT TRUE. In any case, she said that if I was unhappy, she could (??? after the fact ???) come over to me with a «menu» at the same price and brought «fresh from the kitchen» food. This after the experience and my comments to the waitress.
I say, AVOID THIS RESTAURANT AT ALL COSTS. The management/​staff don’t seem to know what they’re doing. And this is, as I explained to the manager, a place where you try it ONE TIME, and never come back — sharing your experience with friends/​family. I told her the approach they are taking guarantees that they’ll ALWAYS HAVE TO ATTRACT FIRST TIME CUSTOMERS — as the restaurant will never gain a following.
Me thinks, NG. Hope my experience and suggestions above will be taken seriously by anyone thinking of visiting this restaurant.

Very bland food, even for a buffet, coupled with indifferent service. A sign over the buffet announces «sushi and hibachi included with buffet» — but the sushi trays were almost empty the whole time I was there, and the buffet station was getting zero business. Little wonder, since the only protein available was some sad-​looking chicken which had been sitting in a pan full of its own juices for God knows how long. Throw in dingy, dated décor (Christmas tinsel over the bar, spotty cleanliness, and the overall tired and run-​down feel of the place, and — well, let’s just say that you have far better choices in the area.

AVOID AT ALL COSTS.
The last time we went there, we discovered that the «food» had been sitting out for HOURS (basically, they rolled the lunch food into the dinner service, and we were there fairly early in the evening). It was beyond inedible.
The «owner» was completely disinterested in hearing any complaints and kept insisting that there was nothing wrong with the food, that it was fresh, and insinuated that we basically didn’t know anything about Chinese food.
Their «sushi» consists of small pieces of dubious-​looking fish done by someone with no experience in making sushi.
Thankfully, it’s only a short drive (or a 10 – 15 minute walk) to either a GOOD sushi restaurant or a GOOD Korean BBQ. You’d be better off going to these (or any other) establishment in the area.
It might have a low price point, but it’s just not worth the risk of getting sick.

Nothing here was really good. Everyone in my family agrees on this. The buffet in Methuen is the same price and at least twice as good. This place had barely any variety. There were no spoons for the ice cream. There were only two ice cream barrels with a decent amount of ice cream. No one offered refills. My server misidentified the colas when she handed them out. Napkins are hard to come by. Someone spilt crayfish or something in the dining room. No one cleaned it up. Under our table was wet and slippery. That was a huge problem as it is a big safety issue. We had to leave the table slowly and cautiously to get food and come back to our chairs. That is really ridiculous. It was Chinese New Year’s and there were barely any people. The boneless ribs were hard. Most things had very little flavor. The hibachi chicken had flavor but the texture seemed stale. They had an empty tray near the red velvet cake. We forgot our coupon for $ 5 and I thought oh well we’ll bring it next time but I don’t think there is going to be a next time. I was thinking in the middle of the meal we could have gone to wendy’s or KFC nearby and it wold have been tastier and cheaper.

Eight dollars for an all-​you-​can-​eat, including lots of variety and a build your own grill, makes this a no brainer. Meat, seafood, desserts, fruit, veggies, sushi, and pizza are all inclusive. Twelve dollars nights and Sunday. Quick service and friendly host. We frequent this restaurant once a week. The only downside can be the Kenny G muzak. Other than that it is definitely worth going to.

Sakura/​New C-​1 Buffet is just OK.
The sign still says C-​1 Buffet. The receipt says «New C-​1 Buffet». It’s better than the old C-​1 buffet, but that’s not saying much. The old C-​1 Buffet was the worst ever.
The buffet was $ 11.99 on a Saturday night, and I’d return if I was looking for a quick, cheap meal before a movie, for example.
I wouldn’t go out of my way to go there, that’s for sure.
Atmosphere is so-​so — they’ve redecorated rather tastefully for this sort of place, the chairs were comfortable, the lights that change color around the buffet are amusing in a ube-​kitschy way and it was adequately clean. They play god-​awful canned music though, and the recorded «Happy Birthday» was the highlight of the evening; at least the wait-​staff didn’t try to sing it — crisis averted !
The build-​your own hibachi station is the real highlight — that was actually pretty good.
The bar is one of the lowlights: they have NO idea how to make a margerita; weak, small, off-​tasting, and $ 8 — avoid.
The spare ribs were meaty and pretty tasty with the usual red sauce of color not found in nature. They had peel and eat shrimp (decent), oysters (not bad, and I’m still alive to type this), and mussels/​clams (OK).
Sushi was halfway decent — not super-​fresh or high-​quality, but it was rather OK for the price, and there was plenty of it, and about 12 – 15 different varieties.
Fried dishes were OK, but the warming lamps could be more powerful (a little on the cold side): plantains (good), pot stickers (OK). Crab rangoons (not so much — small and tasteless), fried squid (good — both rings and tentacles), General Tso Chicken (meh-​too much breading)
The «fresh» dishes were just OK, if bland: Italian Chicken (recommended by review — but meh tonoght), string beans (good, fresh),
Desserts featured hard ice cream in 6 flavors. That’s to the plus side. The Blood Bananas (bananas in strawberry sauce” weren’t bad either. The pastries were the usual flavorless squares of «cake» or dusty «pastries» that every mediocre «Chinese» buffet must order from the same factory. It’s hard to screw up baking apples in pastry, but they managed with their «Apple Pie» — bad tasting pastry, semi-​cooked apples with an off-​flavor. Even with vanilla ice cream on it, it wasn’t quite the treat it could be. Fresh fruit was available, and OK quality.
If you are vegetarian, it would be kind of tough. Pizza, string beans, plantains, and you could do a vegeable plate out of the hibachi station, and there’s iceberg lettuce and tomatoes. and of couse the desserts.
China Buffet in Methuen up near the Salem, NH line is better, but if you are in the area, it’s not the worst value ever.

Sakura Buffet is new to be fair. They took the place of the C-​4 buffet in the same location. We thought that it was going to be a Japanese restaurant based on the flyer which was sent in the mail. The menu has a section for sushi, hibachi, sashimi, and noodles or rice. Five of us went out to find it a modest buffet of American and Chinese. There was very little Japanese style food save for the ‘build your own hiibachi’ station.
The restaurant was only about half full on a Friday evening. Normally I’d say this is usually a bad sign. The old store sign was still on the awning area which caused us to run a around trying to find the new place. This tells me that people aren’t really aware that the new place is even there yet. That being said the buffet was not as attended to as it could have been. It was clean enough but many pans were empty or close to it. The sushi station was an embarrassment. At no time during our visit was this area even 10% full. The sushi attendant wasn’t present much of the time and while he was there he was SLOW. Keep in mind that there was not a huge amount of business.
As self serve ice cream goes I usually steer away from all of them. There is nothing better than seeing the person with the extra long hair bending over and have her hair dangling in drums of unlabled ice cream. Even better are the dirty hands rotating the containers to find out the flavor on the side. That just makes me want to eat even more. YUM. Yeah… stay away from self serve ice cream at any buffet as a rule.
So the food itself was fairly decent. The coconut shrimp and the boneless ribs were among my favorites. Nothing was overly greasy either. Our server was out to lunch. All she needed to do was get us drinks and she could quite recall at anytime that we were five people even when right in front of us. I still have some hope this place will do OK. A staff turnover would be highly suggested though.