Best Buffet

Inexpensive compared to most all you can eat buffets; however, you get what you pay for! The crab was awful, Mongolian grill a joke selection was less than average. Will not be returning.

The only reason I am giving 2 stars is because the owners are incredibly nice people. So nice that I didn’t ask for my money back. In fact, I didn’t even complain to them about how horrible the food was. I realize now that it doesn’t benefit them to stay silent. Therefore, I am leaving my review. The meat must be the lowest grade meat out there. The crab legs were grey. The chicken, YIKES, don’t get me started. Do not eat any of the seafood because you can tell it is absolutely not fresh. Honestly, don’t eat anything here. Hopefully they will replace their extremely low quality food with a better quality meat/​seafood. Until then I will never step foot inside this restaurant again.

So the sign says it opens at 11am but don’t fall for it. I went there at 11am and they had nothing out. Oh wait, they did have chicken wings. I had brought a book so I sat down with a cup of tea and read till they got food out. It wasn’t till noon before they got all the selections out. You would think they would be fresh but the noodles and fried rice were very greasy. For $ 8.79 for their lunch buffet, it’s just not worth it. The lady who seems to always be at the front counter is always nice but I don’t think I’ll be going back again.
They have chow mein noodles, fried rice, sweet and sour chicken, shrimps, Japan chicken, pepper chicken, beef and broc, chicken and veg, Gen Tso, chicken and mushrooms, stir fry green beans, spring rolls, gyoza. They always have an American table too it’s filled with chicken wings, ribs, fish patties from the frozen box, soups. They have a good selection but it’s just not top notch.

I have been coming here with my mother since I was 11, I still come as an adult. They are always so happy to make anything youd like fresh. This place used to be MUCH busier, these days it has slowed down, I feel since then, the employees have worked to learn good english so they can serve great customer service. The staff is so welcoming and warm. Some of the dishes needed to be remade fresh, but they were made quickly. Everything we had was great.

Truly disappointed. Especially for what they charge. I have no clue how they stay in business. The food is cold, or soggy. The service is terrible. Just avoid the headache and stay away.

Sucks bad!!! Don’t waste your money. Restaurant is dirty, food is terrible. Seriously, go somewhere else.

Went for lunch today and half the stations were empty, and what was out was already cold and it was only 1130. Seriously doubt I will go back, there are much better options less than 15 minutes away. The only positive I can say is our hostess was very quick with drinks and was almost apologetic about things.

Definitely the best stir fry for a Chinese buffet I’ve had. The food is always fresh when I come in for lunch and the staff are attentive to ensuring my drink is filled.

1. Nasty
2. No one to cook on grill.
3. Rotten food on boring naked salad bar.
4. Got very ill.

Best Buffett… not! 4pm on Wednesday and most all choices were depleted and was there was cold. Staff was attentive. AVOID

The place had two other occupied tables when we arrived at 3pm. The waitress brought out our drinks and we headed over to the food isles. Half of the food trays were empty and most of the food we did find was lukewarm, over cooked and oily. I don’t think we will return to try this one again.

At first glance the food looked good. But it turned out to be poor quality. Greasy and over cooked mixed meat & veggie dishes. Slice your own ham that tasted bland from sitting out all day. Dried out and off flavorless sushi. Onion ring that were dried out and tasted like cardboard. Ice cream was freezer burn and tasted weird. The table we sat at was very sticky like it had a layer of grease that had been there for years and solidified.
I had a horrible stomach ache after eating here. Sorry but I will not return.
A few nice things to say about Best Buffet… They did have good homemade donuts & egg drop soup. The fruit wasn’t so bad either.

I came here hoping to eat well but sadly disappointed in quality of the food and the service.

Only even there once so far. It was slightly daunting at first. Any place that calls themselves Best Buffet and serves Chinese food sounds like food poisoning to me! But I risked it and thought the food was rather tasty and I didn’t get sick. It was fast easy good. I would go again.

Found myself in Tumwater the other day and thought I’d try a place that calls itself Best. I walked in and was immediately hit with stale oil and food smells. Undaunted, I kept going only to stand there for some time before a surly woman came over.
The carpet was dirty, the furnishings dingy and the food looked bad. I lost my appetite and left. I’m terribly sorry this place is so bad.

Recently I found myself in Tumwater around 2 p.m. and in need of lunch. Spoiled by The Main Chinese Buffet in Lacey, I dropped into a place calling itself The Best Buffet. It wasn’t. It was so bad I felt sorry for the people who worked there, sorry for the people who owned it, and sorry for the patrons. Whatever was on the trays looked to have been there since noon and at its best hadn’t been very good to start with. I took a few bits of the least worst looking. It didn’t even taste blandly institutional. It tasted just about to go bad.
Service was indifferent to say the least. There was a Mongolian style grill with fresh stuffs to be cooked but no one was manning the grill. I saw a woman stand there for ages and no one acknowledged her. She finally walked up to the register to inquire about getting some fresh grilled food. She then continued to wait and wait for someone to come out, fire up the grill and cook her selections. I think I left before she ever got her food.
I paid my bill but on the back left a note stating my disappointment along with sincere good wishes for better times. If you decide to give them a try, make sure it is during the main lunch and dinner hours.

We went to this buffet on a Saturday at 1:30pm for a late lunch after we found that the new Indian place across the highway doesn’t do buffet on the weekend. There were only four other people in the restaurant when we got there, but we were so hungry we ignored this warning. The «Mongolian Grill» section looked horrifying. The meat was not frozen. It was completely thawed and appeared to be forming a slime. They had a sushi section, but nothing was labeled. They had a wide variety of dishes including many seafood dishes. They didn’t have any American dishes to fill out the buffet, which I guess is a good thing. Yet, most items were so greasy or laden with odd tasting sauces that you didn’t want to go back for more. I understand that Chinese buffets aren’t known for great cuisine, but they could have tried a little harder. Especially considering the price. Three people for lunch with one drink and a tip they didn’t deserve came to $ 45. I thought with the time of day we would be charged $ 7 – 8 per person, but instead were charged $ 10.99 each. If you want to eat a lot of greasy weird tasting Chinese food you may have trouble keeping it down at this place.

My husband and I got an unexpected night out alone and decided to ‘indulge’ in a Chinese Buffet. We were lazy and paid for it.
The food was terrible and the place felt sticky/​dirty. If we’d followed our instinct when we walked in and saw only two other couples there on a Saturday night at 5pm we would have been better off.
I think I tried almost everything that looked edible — much of it didn’t — and didn’t manage to finish one complete item. By the end we both just decided to get up and go get a burger!!! It was really bad.

I went here one night while overnighting on a business trip. It was a little later than their usual dinner rush and there was only one other table. Four different members of the staff assured me that if there was anything short on the buffet, please ask and they would make it for me special. I took them up on the offer with the crab legs… and 5 minutes later fresh crab just for me.
The price here is fantastic for what you get. $ 10 bucks including crab… for real. The staff is friendly… and the other stuff is good too. I particularly liked the coconut shrimp, spring rolls, and the soups were tasty too.
Its not super high quality but tasty, plentful, cheap and friendly. Keep up the good work guys!

Ack, I think I need to revisit my review of Super Buffet. I thought that merely bad/​weird food of questionable content was as bad as a buffet could get. Best Buffet gives them a serious run for their money on being the worst food in the world.
They have the apparently-​desirable-​to-​someone dishes that are a mix of some sort of seafood and a bunch of cheese and mayonnaise or something. They have pizza. They have some chicken that has been covered with red food dye and which has absolutely no flavor. The things which do have flavor are cloyingly-​sweet (e.g. the pizza, the meat dishes) and/​or outright revolting (e.g. the pizza, the meat dishes.)
I really don’t know how to describe it as food. I admit I have a tendency to call the most inedible food «not food» and that that’s not really useful. How’s this: they apparently sometimes indulge in the «Mongolian BBQ» style, judging by the unattended, sitting-​at-​room-​temperature raw meats in one area. All of the cooked meat hovers well below standard buffet temperature.
The best things (i.e. the only edible things) are the things they obviously buy in: cream puffs, inarizushi with wakame.
I will have nightmares about the probably-​HFCS-​laden «cheese wonton» (which is really «cheese and krab» wonton, though one wonders if «krab» is not enough of a perversion of «crab» and that the brand name for knock-​off «krab» might be «kreb» or «krub» or something.) I will never get the taste of their un-​sauced sweet and sour chicken out of my mouth. Even the revolting Lee’s Buffet manages to use something vaguely like chicken in that stuff, and also manages to not keep it lukewarm and with some bizarre, rancid flavor absent.
To top it off: they don’t water-​down their drinks, they seem to add food coloring to their water. I’m not kidding — lemonade tasted like tap water but had a disturbing, cloudy yellow color. I think that like their red-​dye chicken, they just add food coloring to the drinks. Makes sense.
I really hope that this is as bad as food gets in Olympia/​Lacey/​Tumwater. I feel vaguely ill just thinking about it, and I’m sure I’ll be thinking about it as I’m vaguely ill for the next several days from the food. Really inexcusably awful.
And I remain traumatized by watching an elderly couple that came in fish large portions of «salmon» out of its room-​temperature oil-​poaching bath with a glee unsurpassed.