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Name Of Establishment	China #1 Buffet
Address:	1341 Pacheco Blvd. Los Banos Ca.
Phone Number:	Unknown
Website:	Unknown
Prices:	Moderate
Date Of Review:	October 7, 2006
Check out the Official Merced County Health Inspection of this Restaurant - If that link isn't working try this link (note: these links are slow to load)
Our Overall Numeric Rating	+
Summation Opinion: Great on the variety, not so great on SOME of the quality. Kind of a mix.

As a family who loves to eat out we also really enjoy any new opportunities to have more variety in restaurant choices in Los Banos. So when the new China #1 Buffet restaurant was being built we were very much anticipating our first visit - in part because we sometimes go to a nice Chinese buffet in Merced for special occasions and we were hoping when we saw this new place come in. We were really hoping we would be able to skip the drive and enjoy the same sort of thing here in town. So we kinda got our hopes up...

Sadly, China #1 Buffet turned out to be a mild disappointment. While we didn't truly dislike them, we also weren't very impressed.

It is nice to have another Chinese restaurant ion Los Banos for the variety factor but, in our opinion, this places does not at this point beat at least two of the Chinese food establishments already in town including Panda and China Garden.

Aesthetics

Our first impression upon walking into the restaurant was a very good one. You can tell the owners put a lot of thought and effort into making China #1 Buffet an attractive place. It is not fancy per-se, but it is attractive and unique for this town. There are classy glass panels with what looks like hand painted scenes separating the buffet area and a blue backlit chandelier type lighting over the food island. Wainscoting covers the lower half of the walls and almost everything in the main part of the restaurant was fresh, new, pretty, and clean looking when we visited.

The floor tiles throughout the restaurant had a white cast to them that reminded me of a bleached look one might get if they used too strong a concentration of cleaning chemicals. I thought this kind of detracted from the otherwise overall "polished" feel to the place. You can't really fault the staff for that though. At least the floor was "clean" although there were a few "trails" of spilled food from the buffet area to the tables and booths. I would expect food on the floor in a place where patrons carry their own food to their tables but would have liked to see staff clean it up more promptly. Despite these few minor flaws though, the place was pretty sharp looking.

The restrooms needed some slight attention. They were not as clean as I would expect from a "new" restaurant. The staff had also neglected to check the consumables that afternoon so there were no paper towels to dry our hands on.

The Food

We took a booth to the far left by the windows and were told we could go and get our plates and food after our soda order was taken. The food looked great. There were all sorts of tempting choices. We loaded our plates up with items such as spring rolls, seafood, orange chicken, fried wontons with cream cheese and crab, meat dishes, mushrooms, noodles, rice, fresh fruit, chicken wings and a lot more! Most of the items available were distinctly Chinese food except for a few things like french fries and cheese pizza. Most of the offerings on the desert table (fruit, cookies, etc.) were also distinctly 'American'.

We returned to our booth and began sampling what we had each chosen from the buffet island. Although we really enjoyed the great number of items to select from, neither one of us was really wowed by the taste or temperature of most of what we returned to the table with.

One of the things we have a soft spot for is "Orange Chicken" this is a dish that we really try to eat any place it is available. The color and texture of the chicken was good but the sauce just did not have that pizzazz that gives such a dish the flavor we think it needs. Similarly the sweet and sour seemed a little bit, (not badly so) on the bland side. The crab wontons on the other hand were quite good. They were cooked just right and the filling was quite tasty. Similarly the spring rolls were also very good. The flakiness of the wrap was just right and the filling was equally tasty and the rolls were not greasy to the touch.

In general, most of the food was "good" but not great. Flavors just weren't very strong or distinct in dishes such as the orange chicken (a favorite of ours at Panda). I will say that there were a few items that we would go back to China Buffet for but in most cases the items we sampled were not in our opinion very noteworthy.

Another downside we noticed on this visit was that many items were not especially hot unless they had just been refreshed in the pan. This may also have detracted from our overall experience.

Dessert was uninspiring. I tried some of the soft serve ice cream but it had a gritty texture because of tiny chunks of ice throughout it. My husband did like the chocolate pudding and I enjoyed some of the fresh strawberries. The cookies offered were bland and didn't do much for either one of us. It would have been nice to have some good chocolate cake or something similar as a dessert offering.

The Service

The service we received was frankly the worst part of our visit. None of the staff that we interacted with seemed very friendly at any point of our visit. The feeling we got from them was that they were all fairly distant and "unapproachable". For us a dining experience can be made or broken by the service and in our personal opinion this is an area that needs some attention at China Buffet #1.

The staff was also overzealous in cleaning up our table. We had been presented with our bill and we had paid it before we went back for desert. Somehow they made the assumption that we were leaving and took our sodas and washed our table up for the next client. After saying a perfunctory "sorry" to us as we were heading back with a loaded desert plate, they did nothing to fix their error. No sodas were brought back to us even though it was clear we were still eating. I guess since we had already paid the bill that they had brought to us when we were still eating they assumed we were done when the money hit the table. Perhaps it was just an innocent mistake, but it made us feel rushed at the end.

Speaking of the bill... When we eat out we always leave a gratuity unless the service is abominable or surly. We believe that tipping is a free will generosity however and we take offense at those restaurants that automatically add a gratuity to the bill even for group dining. Similarly, when a wait person ASKS for a tip we find this faux paus to be pretty offensive or at the very least presumptuous. After we received our bill we put cash on the tray and the waitress asked if we wanted our change. For us this is the same thing as asking for a tip and it feels pushy. We were not at all impressed by that.

Summary

We left China #1 Buffet feeling let down compared to the level of our previous anticipation. The place is gorgeous for a restaurant of this type. The variety of food was appreciated but the quality in some aspects such as temperature and 'zing' is in our opinion a bit lacking. There are also some service and friendliness issues that we believe need to be worked out.

In our opinion China #1 Buffet is good for when you want an "unlimited" supply of food and want to try lots of different things. If you have kids, they will most likely LOVE it. We didn't though and when we want Chinese food in town we'll probably end up at some of the other local Chinese food establishments for a while.

We recognize that this is a brand new restaurant and so there is bout to be some 'settling in' and 'work-in' time before they hit their stride so we may return at a later date to see if things have changed.

If we do that we will post a follow-up here.

Specific Opinions By Reviewer One
Overall Rating :
Food:	Mixed
Service:	Waitpersons should never 'troll for tips' and smiles would be nice
Decor:	Unique for LB and lots of very nice work went into this aspect.
Price/Value:
Bathroom Cleanliness:	No hand towels
Romance Factor:
Family Friendliness:	Kids will love pigging out!
This is a NEW place so we expect that there is a settling in process that just has not been fully realized yet.

Specific Opinions By Reviewer Two
Overall Rating :
Food:	A real mix. Some of the flavors were too bland. Temp. was a bit too cold.
Service:	Not friendly at all.
Decor:
Price/Value:
Bathroom Cleanliness:	Need towels and a general picking up of trash.
Romance Factor:
Family Friendliness:	Kids will love it.

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Reviews in this section are simply personal opinions. We are sharing these, our experiences and opinions as a means to further discussion in our Los Banos Forums section not to promote or discommend any particular business. In fact we absolutely encourage our readers to make a personal visit to each of the restaurants we review and form your own opinion which (if it is respectful and honest) you are encouraged to post on the Los Banos Bulletin Boards where you are also welcome to discus OUR reviews.

More About Our Los Banos Restaurant Reviews

In this section, the staff of Our Los Banos .com shares our personal opinions on the restaurants that we patronize in the City of Los Banos. We would like to stress that we are not professional reviewers, that we have had little or no training in the food arts, and that we are simply expressing our own personal views and opinions on particular visits that we made to the establishments under consideration.

Subjectivity. We make no pretense of the fact that we are not objective. As with art, food is a subjective experience subject to personal opinion and even whim. Some people love a particular artist's work while others can not stand what is put on canvas. Picasso comes to mind. Similarly people's appreciation for a particular chef's abilities are uniquely their own. While our tastes are very eclectic and we enjoy a tremendous variety of different types of food, we do not expect our readers will agree with all of our opinions and views. We DO encourage our readers to try each of the places that we have reviewed and then you can discuss (politely and in a positive fashion) your experiences and opinion of our review in the Los Banos Forum section.

Merced County Health Food Facility Inspections Site

Finally, we strongly encourage our readers to make use of a truly wonderful online resource we discovered last year. Merced County has put together a very cool Food Facility Inspection website which discloses the results of the County Health Department's last few inspections of each restaurant. The results are sometimes quite fascinating and are always interesting. Beware however you may not want to eat at certain places once you read some of the more dramatic entries. We at Our Los Banos .com very much appreciate and support the county of Merced putting these Department of Health food facility inspections online for the public to see.

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