GASTRONOMY REVIEW: Emperor Chinese Restaurant, Llandudno.

Occupying the small first floor of a busy main road (Mostyn Street) in the centre of Llandudno town, is this enigma of a restaurant. A Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet, which is truly a mixture of the good, bad, and utterly bizarre.

The 'buffet', so it turns out, is not just what can be taken from a series of hot plates on one side of the room, but also includes table-service soup for starter, and table-service main course dishes (as many as you like and can eat!). In fact, the whole menu could easily be made into a sturdy 5-course meal, even if you only had one item each time: soup / aromatic duck and pancakes / buffet bar / main dish / dessert.

The buffet bar however is where the strangeness began. Some, but by no means all of the food on offer here is Chinese. Veggie samosas, chicken nuggets, chips, slices of pork in BBQ sauce, and various other foods from either India or America were mixed with spring rolls, prawns etc. And there was nothing Chinese about the desserts either... lemon meringue pie, chessecake, fresh fruit salad, lemon cake, etc..

It also was not perticulatly clear on what the buffet included, and it was very easy to over-face yourself with buffet items, not realising you also had a main course dish to wade through too. And wade through you must, otherwise they will levy a £5 surcharge on your bill for "excessive waste". The pricing of the buffet was reasonable at £14.99 per head Sunday to Thursday [£2 extra Friday and Saturday]; however, we were caught out by not reading or noticing that on school holidays, the higher price is charged regardless of the day!

This was the first time I have ever been into a Chinese restaurant and not seen any evidence of Chinese staff. This one was staffed almost entirely by West Africans [which again, didn't go with the Indian style food on offer....!]

The place is clean, and the service is prompt and polite, but the food leaves much to be desired. 

Reviewer - Matthew Dougall