I don't expect much from buffets but there is a kind of minimum standard that you need to be above. That being said, Mandarin didn't cut it.
The place does have freshness issues. I made a decent enough taco but the salsa was obviously old. When that's one of the first things you taste, it makes you a bit skeptical about everything else.
No rice cooker? The white rice is put into a smallish bin that's usually low in supply. The fried rice has an artificial look about it (bright colors?) and doesn't have much in the way of taste. You don't have to have the best fried rice in the world but in the buffet game you have to make sure you don't have the worst.
Lots of chicken dishes, but I made the mistake of biting into a big piece that had lost most of it's coating, and it was a bland experience. The kind of bland where it makes you think about how processed this food is. Not a good reminder while eating.
The pizza just looks bad, the kind where the red sauce is just drying away. I have such a low threshold on pizza quality that Totino's gets me excited, but what I saw at Mandarin didn't make me want to allocate calories to it. I did try the famous tamale and it reminded me of the Hormel canned tamales. Just reminder after reminder of the processed food....
Clean place, nice staff, fast seating, parking kind of sucks if the spots right out front are all taken. At the end of the day there weren't those 1 or 2 go-to dishes that would make me want to return.