Cathay Center

Serious townie bar that does karaōke 7 days a week. This is a bar review only. Staff is surly but friendly and the patrons are … well local bar patrons. Never a lack of characters. Drinks are strong and the karaōke host is a good time.
No nonsense, just good drinks and good people.

Been coming here for over 10 years and the owner is visible and very accommodating (say you want more duck or ginger sauce, no prob)! Love their fried raviolis and healthy options.
They stay open late which works great for me. Always have some leftovers so you get a lot for your buck. Bar is always hopping and everyone is really friendly.

The portion sizes are great! Really a great value for the amount of food you get. The drinks are a good price. It isn’t a 5 star Chinese restaurant but it’s good food for what you pay and it’s a fun place if you want to go out drinking and eat a plate of General Tso’s chicken.

Service was great; but food was sub par. Seafood (scallops and lobster) tasted funny. I actually spit out my one bite of lobster and threw the rest away. The house fried rice was the best dish that I got there but it definitely is not the best that I’ve had.
My waitress was amazing and attentive. Can’t blame the waitress for the bad food.

Great food! Good service! We left a tip and made sure it was a decent one. Man came back with small amount of change and said next time leave a tip!
I was shocked. My friends were shocked. We didnt know what to say. Nothing like that has ever happened. Someone has to be pocketing money. Neighbors left mad also probably for the same reason.

Been coming here a lot recently, the food is fresh and open late. The staff is so friendly and I look forward to seeing them, not to mention the scallion pancakes are fuego! I’ll always be a customer. Worth a try, they’re open late and very well priced.

Typical local
. The food is just subpar! The service is fair. With all that said, they always appear to be busy! There is a much better place in Braintree just over the Fore River Bridge.
Check my other reviews!

Went here for lunch and had a really great buffet. One of the best Chinese places in Weymouth!

I love this place. The people who work there make an effort to talk with you. They are very nice. I will admit that I liked the décor of the previous place better though. I love an old school chinese restaurant but, times are changing. The food comes out quick, the water is always filled, good portions and it taste good too. Nice family feel in this place.

Ordered food last night and waited 5 minutes at the counter after both bartenders looked at me twice knowing I was waiting to pick up food. The crab Rangoon’s were not hot, the menu said there was 12 in an order only got 10. Plus one had a long black hair in it. Nasty! Will think twice next time I order Chinese from the area

I wish my husband and I didn’t get our signals crossed before we ordered. We were really hungry and just drove in to give it a try. The place was in total chaos, Mother’s Day and I guess they were a little busy. The thing is they were pushing the «Buffet» so we figured why not. The food was old, no getting around it. It was a total mistake, if I had checked it out we would have left. The buffet was small, tucked in a corner. Everything was dried up. We should have not eaten and just paid the drink bill, but the drinks didn’t come until we had hit the food.
The worse part is, I barely made it home before rushing to the bathroom. Felt sick the rest of the day and we both couldn’t sleep last night. MSG overload? Needless to say we would never consider going back to this dump.

I patronized this place on and off since the mid-​60s, at which time it was the only Chinese restaurant south of the Neponset River. The décor and exterior sign hadn’t changed from those days until 2004, when a serious fire had them shut down for the better part of a year while they rebuilt.
In more recent years, I’d mostly hit the buffet, which is large, frequently restocked, and reasonable in price. My in-​laws (who live 100 miles from Quincy) were so enchanted that every time they visited us, they’d take the time to stop here from a bite … even when a sudden snowstorm should’ve had them on the road a lot earlier than they were!
About my only major complaint, and what dropped a star, is that their delivery scope is limited. They’ll deliver several miles away to South Weymouth, bizarrely enough, but only as far as Southern Artery in Quincy, a fraction of the distance, and one street short of where I lived for ten years; I’d have ordered a lot more delivery from them if that hadn’t been the case.
I live in the same town as my in-​laws now, and I don’t see myself driving 2+ hours for the buffet, but I hope Cathay Center’s open for generations yet.

I love the Cathay center! They do karaōke everyday so that’s always fun! Paul is a fun kj and he’s there fri and sat. I don’t eat the food much but when I do it’s always good.
Our service is always fast. Kim is a great server/​bartender. All the staff are friendly. The owner suzi is so sweet. She’s always accommodating. I feel like everyone knows everyone at this bar and are pretty friendly. Every so often something washed up comes in but I’ve seen them shut people off and kick people out plenty of times.
We even had my cousins surprise 21^st b day in the function room. It was great. There was about 30 of us and it was so comfortable. Service was fast and good was good. We had a great time.

Went for the lunch buffet. Food was hot, fresh, and fully stocked. Waiters were very attentive and friendly.
Will definitely be going back for lunch!

Well I had the illustrious
gift certificate, but the food was 50% okay, the two more expensive dishes we got were what ended up being the bathroom shuffle meals. Automatic 18% tip added, wtf, never going back to this pit, also menu had hairs in it, server was nice but annoying? Kept coming over every minute to ask if everything was okay, I think it was to distract us from eating the steak dish that had some kind of ketchup on it, that was the Hong Kong steak. Other bad dish was the sizzling scallops. I have another
gift certificate I’m not going to use. Blah.

I tried the lunch buffet with someone else. We both thought ALL the food tasted horrible. Some was under cooked, others just tasted plain bad, everything tasted fishy. How do you mess up chicken fingers .
Another thing that ticked me off and you should BEWARE of is. They add 18 percent TIP directly to the bill. I’ve never seen a business do that with less then a 5 or 6 person table. It’s sleazy. So check your bill so you don’t double tip. But I guess with food like this. They better try to hide the tip somewhere.
That said, our waiter was very nice and attentive.

Everything I have ever ordered here has been good ribs salt and pepper chicken wings are fantastic beef and garlic sauce and tofu with eggplant is yumm too good late night Chinese!

How do customers accept the quality of this Asian (fusion) food?! My family and I are Asian, and we’ve had extensive experience in going to both amazing and awful Asian restaurants. After trying the Cathay Center, I feel like I have a duty to warn everyone about this place!
As soon as we entered, we saw that there were no other Asian customers… usually a bad sign. We used a certificate from
for 3. After looking through the menu for a few minutes we decided on an appetizer along with 3 entrees. Our young inexperienced waiter took our orders and rushed off to attend to the other customers. Even though the restaurant wasn’t full they still seemed understaffed.
Time passed while we snacked on the bread with sauce and we spotted our waiter carrying the first order, which surprisingly was NOT our appetizer but the Sizzling Mongolian Beef entrée. Ok, honest mistake. We were pretty hungry so we we all shared a portion of it waiting on everything else. After ~10 minutes our waiter returned with the rest of our entrees. He brought the Shrimp Noodles for my mom, and a strange looking dish that looked nothing like Beef Teriyaki and Chicken Curry. Instead in front of me was some meaty Mushroom Soup with Chicken Fingers on the side. I hate sending back food, but the order was COMPLETELY WRONG. The waiter was extremely apologetic, and he probably wrote down the wrong number. LAST and definitely least came our unappetizing appetizer of Shumai in what looked like an ash tray (common dim sum dish usually served in bamboo/​metal steamer).
Try as they might to imitate our favorites — just too many aspects of this restaurant offended our calibrated Asian cuisine tastebuds for us to go back!
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BREAKDOWN OF FOOD
1. Sizzling Mongolian Beef (with white rice) — a bit salty and saucy but overall edible. The rice was hard and lukewarm. It tasted just like rice we make at home after refrigerating the leftovers and reheating it.
2. Shrimp Noodles — tasted like doughy string with small peanuts sprinkled, the shrimps were pretty large though.
3. Beef Teriyaki & Chicken Curry (with pork fried rice) — the beef was on a skewer and actually tasted okay. The chicken was tasteless by itself, but unfortunately they also drenched it in «curry» comparable to bile. Similar to the white rice, the pork fried rice tasted dry/​reheated.
4. Shumai — 10 crushed lukewarm pieces that my mom and I couldn’t choke down. Maybe they didn’t microwave it long enough? Either way we could have bought tastier frozen ones from the Asian Supermarket and steamed them ourselves!

Great food, servers very nice and attentive.
We used a
certificate, it was tough to spend $ 37.50 on the two of us… lots of leftovers! Huge portions… good seasoning and spices.
Minus one star for limited accessibility, bad surrounding location, and rough crowd in the bar area.

My hubs and I ordered take out one New Year’s Eve a few years ago and I thought it wasn’t very good then, but I chalked it up to NYE business being crazy.
So when I ended up w a gift certificate to Cathay from a yankee swap at an office party, we ended up finally using it about two months ago and were pleasantly surprised, it wasn’t bad.
We ordered take out last night and I’m quite certain there was more oil in the dishes we ordered than in my car. It was like everything was coated in slime; my husband got the #21 — General Gau’s w/​boneless ribs. He’s pretty easy to please but he thought it was just awful, and the ribs were extremely fatty.
I ordered Mongolian Beef and steamed dumplings; they forgot the ginger sauce and those poor little slices of beef needed my daughters floaties to keep from drowing in the Exxon Valdez-​esque sauce.
We won’t be going back.