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| - I have some memories of going to Mandarin as a kid, my grandparents love this place so I would always come here for their birthdays. I hadn't been here for at LEAST 10 years but...
Recently I was here for my gradnparents' anniversary for lunch and it has somehow stayed the same as I remembered it. Tacky, dated decor like multiple fish tanks and off colour furniture isn't the best ambience for a restaurant.
The Mandarin is a buffet (I've always hated buffets) that has primarily Asian inspired food like spicy chicken, pork and beef. There's also American food like fries and onion rings, Caesar salad. The food was incredibly average, and inconsistent as with all buffets, some items were hotter than others. Mandarin has too much variety, and loses it's theme as an Asian restaurant.
Mandarin has a full dessert bar too but nothing was great there, they had ice cream cotton candy, I'm sure to appeal to kids.
Mandarin has NO draught beer, all beer is in bottles. They have all the same beers a normal bar would have Canadian, Coors etc. The only Asian beer they had was Sapporo. This is pretty surprising, you would think at an Asian restaurant they would have some nice exotic Asian beers on tap. This seems like a missed opportunity. All they had was Sapporo in bottles which I had. It tasted flat to me.
The Mandarin is cheap lunch was $15 a person and even cheaper for seniors who get an additional 20% off (which is why my grandparents love this place so much).
The crowd is typically seniors and families with young children.
There is nothing appealing about Mandarin, with so many better Asian restaurants in the GTA.
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