Medicine Hat Media

Posts Tagged ‘Buffet’

The Chinese buffet-style restaurant, New Imperial Palace Restaurant has closed… er, rather, it’s been closed, forcefully. That was on May 13th. A day later, it was re-opened. This was all due to a Alberta Health Services inspection whereby 36 separate points against its facilities were raised on an inspection on May 12th. It was a pretty grim list of gross things going on as shown in the Executive Officer’s Order PDF. After you read through it, I would also like to mention that ALL of the problems have been resolved as shown in the re-inspection on May 14th.

To me, it seems like that was a lot of stuff to solve in just a single day? However, I trust the re-inspection fully and would feel safe to eat there again… that is, if I wanted to. I’ve been there about three times and while it was “decent”, it has nothing on Medicine Hat Buffet especially if you are looking for that type of thing. To most people, after reading this, they will be spoiled on the idea of the restaurant forever, which sealed the fate for a similarly closed restaurant, Menggu Grill which faced a similar inspection closing and re-opening.

New Imperial Palace Restaurant’s full history of inspections


The name of the restaurant is “Buffet Medicine Hat”. That means, when you say something like, “Oh, I feel like some buffet food!”, everybody automatically assumes you mean Buffet Medicine Hat because you’re in Medicine Hat. It’s kind of like if there was a place called “Fancy Dinner Medicine Hat” and you felt like a fancy night-out, it would be assumed you would want to go there. No? Okay, obviously I’m being a little facetious here, the naming always intrigued me though. It is pretty generic, but I think in a marketing sense it works a lot better than “stereotypical Asian reference restaurant” that a lot of businesses use in the same genre of eating.

It may deserve the naming though. It literally is the biggest buffet joint in the hat – in terms of eating space but also in terms of the amount of food and deserts they serve. The dinner (which starts at 4:00PM each day) buffet is a little bigger than their lunch selection – at dinner they bring out the big things like roast beef and a full turkey/chicken with stuffing. They also have a special brunch on Sundays when they serve every breakfast thing you could ever imagine.

In terms of the quality of the food (since that is the biggest factor of any buffet place), it is decent – which may be interpreted as “meh”. I say that because although I do have a “once every month” craving for buffet food I usually end up at the Jungle Cafe instead of other buffet restaurants in town such as: Buffet Medicine Hat, New Imperial Palace Restaurant, Ming Court Family Restaurant, Hat’s Restaurant (another silly generic named one), or Sizzling Wok. This is because Jungle Cafe literally is the best Buffet place in Medicine Hat (my opinion), but it is a little pricey. Although that would count as getting off the subject of this review. In the list of other buffet places in the city though, Buffet Medicine Hat would definitely be the top in terms of quality, taste and atmosphere. You also have to weight in the amount of diversity of food available at Buffet Medicine Hat as well which definitely raises it above its competitors.

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