Raymond’s Restaurant

Very slow service! I had already been waiting 45 minutes for my beef and ginger hot pot, until the waiter came to me saying that the chef is now cooking it. I asked what the hold up was and he said a big table came in AFTER me that needed their food faster. UH? Crazy! Just because the bigger table was spending more money doesn’t mean my order should neglected. PLUS the restaurant is filthy! Dirt everywhere, don’t customers notice? I cringe at what the kitchen potentially might look like! Gross! Do not even think about eating here.

The WORST, trust the other reviews, they aren’t joking! They’ve removed many dishes that used to be edible and have replaced them with old cakes, small hard muffins… RUN, don’t walk away, RUN, go to Don Mee’s in Chinatown and order a couple dishes of food that’s not going to make you feel ill and ripped off! TRUST the REVIEWS!!!

A buffet with a good selection of food, including a fish table and a good desert.
We have been here several times and have always been satisfied. Of course there is a fresher choice at meal times than in the middle of the afternoon.

Raymond’s is a Chinese Buffer in the small strip mall at Cloverdale and Blanshard, opposite the Accent Inn. You can see it on from the highway, sitting there next to the Jenny Craig centre. It advertises a buffet and dim-​sun. I’ve never seen Dim-​Sun served. I have seen people order off a menu. I have never been offered one, but I’ve never asked either.
I walk in, and take a seat on a small dining room chair, a nice white table cloth and single fork. I see the central buffet bar, stacks of plates, and with no further waiting, head over. The buffet area is tiled, and always feels slippery. This should have be a clue. But despite it being offered, I go ahead and take a good pile of fried rice with pork, a spoonful of salt-​and-​pepper salmon, some ginger beef and garlic pork. And maybe a serving of vegetables. Which are primarily bok choy leaves in a sauce that is very watery, but tastes of the tears. Everything, they say in large labels, has MSG in it. I would guess the sauce is actually just water, MSG and maybe a lemon.
I carefully step back to my table, and the waiter offers me something to drink. I get Chinese tea. The Chinese tea here is good. I can’t fault it. Maybe I have developed an addiction to it, and that’s why I go back again and again?
The rice is heavy on a sour spiced flavour, that seems to be in almost everything here. It’s not unpleasant, exactly. It just lurks and hangs around for a good while afterwards. If you want to keep tasting your food afterwards, this is just the place for you. The salmon is crispy fried in the skin. There’s a chilli flakes on the thin batter that covers it. It is a complete waste of salmon. It feeds you, but the poor fish could have been jerked or candied. Or treated with a little more care than the hard fried chunk dished up here for gluttons like me.
Complete review here:

DO NOT EAT HERE!!! DO NOT EAT HERE!!!
We were hungry after a long day of traveling and my kids wanted Chinese so we saw this buffet and decided to try it.
There was 7 of us in our party. We got seated and the waitress asked what we would like to drink, we all asked for water. The water came with no ice and black floating things in it. We all go up to the buffet since we didn’t get any menus so that is all we thought there was. I grabbed a plate and began to circle around the dirty half filled pans of what they said was Chinese food. Trying to read the dirty hand written sticky notes that had a small description of the dish. I really had to take a double look at the sign that said «we DO have MSG in all our food» wow didn’t know people still used that. All the food looked the same, it all looked like it had been sitting out all day drying and shriveling up never change out just stirred around a couple times.
All the meat was pork except some things they called chicken wings but I had to wonder. The sauce on the every dish looked the same thick and sticky. They had tator tots and fries that my son got and couldn’t eat because they were so hard and dry. (that is because they sat for hours) gross!
Out of 7 of us only four attempted to eat something, leaving all of it except a couple bites on the plate. The waitress that came to pick up the plates should have noticed all the food left. I must say though the best part of the evening was when my son decided he would just eat some jello and when he brought it back to the table it was literally melting. Moving around the plate as it turned into liquid. We were in tears because we were laughing so hard.
We went up to pay and they gave us a bill for all 7 of us and 5 sodas. Now first off if you remember at the beginning of this review non of us had soda and only four of us attempted to eat. When my husband tried to explain that to her she argued with him. He told her only four of us ate and we all had water. She finally took off the soda and charged us for four people. We paid $ 85+ for four people that literally took a couple bites of food. $ 18.95 per person for a disgusting, sat out all day, melting jello meal was a bit much.
If you are in the mood for horrible food with horrible service the this is the place for you. But beware, this place should be SHUT DOWN!!!
I really wish I could give negative stars but Unilocal won’t let me!

Giving Raymond’s a 2^nd chance was a dissapointment. $ 20 a plate for that buffet was not worth the quality available! $ 12 would be fair, $ 15 was expected. The air conditioning was on so high, on a chilly November night, that the food cooled dramatically before we could finish it. Epic fail.

We were staying at a motel just across the street, and the nearby Red Robin was overflowing, so we thought we’d give this place a try, but this was THE WORST CHINESE BUFFET I HAVE EVER PATRONISED, which was shocking for me. For heaven’s sake, this town has a huge Chinatown nearby! Shame, shame, shame!
Not only did Raymond’s have filthy, ancient chairs, but there were splatters of old food/​sauce on the blinds and on our condiment tray. The only ambiance were a few tasseled Koi decorations hanging from the ceiling here and there waving hopelessly in the otherwise vast expanse of off-​white walls .
There were many Asian customers who were apparently offered (and seemed to be enjoying) a Dim Sum menu, but we as Caucasians were not offered anything but the buffet, which was disgusting. Onion rings and Pumpkin pie? Vanilla pudding? Come on! The handwritten notes on scratch paper taped to the sneeze-​board screamed, «unprofessional». All entrees (as noted on the scratch-​paper signs) tasted the same regardless of what meat it claimed to have. They all had the same dark, gloppy sauce. We thought there’d be at least some basic white rice around, but there wasn’t any. No rice? Please.
One of the hostesses continually made a big point of rounding the buffet stirring everything to make it look less hagged-​out, which topped-​off the grossness of it all.
We paid, but our «dinner» consisted of a a couple of beers and «lets get outta here». Ramsay would shut this place down in a heartbeat.
Never, never, NEVER going back!

From the moment my compadre and I walked in to Raymonds we knew we made a mistake. The service was slow and be grudging. The buffet was fully stocked with dirty empty pans. What food there was was Meh. At this point we should have left, staying was our mistake. Though it was 3:30 pm on a Saturday. Maybe don’t go for buffet at 3:30 pm on a Saturday.

I had lunch here today and my digestive system has been cursing me ever since. It is unlikely that I will be back any time soon.

Came here for the first time with family that recommended it. I picked up a plate to get a salad to find a dish tub of lettuce with two squeeze bottles of dressing (1000 island and ranch both looking quite nasty). I then took my still empty plate and walked around the small buffet area looking for something edible… I was unable to find anything that looked remotely edible and then noticed the «There is MSG in our food» sign… so not only could I not eat what they called salad, I couldn’t eat the food either. I refuse to eat any food that needs a flavour enhancer regardless of the type of food. In this day and age of healthy eating, it is surprising to find even a Chinese restaurant adding MSG to ALL it’s food.
Deciding against eating, I figured that I would at least have a beverage. When the waiter had first come by to ask what we all wanted to drink I had said that we would like to wait a minute until all of us had been seated as two of the people were using the restrooms. When the waiter came back, he asked the other people at the table and totally ignored me. So here I sit with no food and not even a glass of water while I write this review.
Not only will I not come back, I will go out of my way to make that consumers are informed of the lack of good food and good service here.
And the only reason I am giving it one star is that I can’t post a review of 0 stars or negative stars.

When on vacation in Victoria, the family wanted to go out for some Chinese food. We asked the guy at the front desk about any Chinese buffets around and he said that this one was apparently «the best» in Victoria.
There are no other Chinese buffets in Victoria.
The sauce on some of the chicken was super thick and disgusting, and there wasn’t much of a variety of dishes to chose from. Though the chow mein was really good.
The only thing worth going there for is the chow mein, and their desert area.
When we were waiting to go, it took forever to even get the attention of the hostess to bring over our bill. We waited for about 7 minutes before they even noticed that we were asking for the bill.
There are better places to go find Chinese food in Victoria. Even if it’s a buffet, it’s not worth coming here.

This was by far my worst dining experience. A friend and I stopped at Raymond’s hoping the food would be ok. The empty dining room should have been a clue to turn away but we were hungry. The food was absolutely disgusting. It was as if the sweet and sour pork had sat under the heat lamps all day. The sauce was a very thick, sugary mess. The hostess didn’t speak enough english to understand our complaints. We were charged 33 dollars for a meal we couldn’t finish.

Barely decent food quality with horrible service.
We got the buffet for my sister and I, and they charged my diabetic grandma full price for eating a piece of vegetable. What the hell.
Slow service and no smiles whatsoever? My kind of place!