Guang Zhou Chinese Restaurant

I have driven past this place so many times over the years and have always wanted to stop in. I took my two oldest kids there on Christmas Eve for the lunch buffet. We were all very happy with the service and the food. There could have been a bit more variety but all in all, it was a great experience. We will be back for sure!

This place is the gold standard in Chinese take-​out.
Best pork fried rice ever. Not that peas and carrots crap other places serve. This is the real deal.
I’m also equally impressed with their fried chicken, sesame chicken, house eggrolls– and as a bonus they often give you fresh fried donuts for no extra charge.
**EDIT**
I forgot to mention they give you a RIDICULOUS amount of food. If you order four entrees to go, it’s going to be hefty grocery bag weighing in at about a buck and a quarter a pound. Great for me, because I love leftovers.

In town for the night and needed a close place to grab an early dinner. This place definitely hit the spot, clean and the staff was very professional. Ordered the sweet and sour chicken, definitely wasn’t disappointed!

Staff are super friendly and the food is great! We stop it quite often and always feel welcomed when we are there. We love the «chicken lady» ! (Sue)

Some advice, make sure to come with an empty stomach to the lunch buffet.
Though nothing fancy, GuangZhou serves some satisfying comfort food. Their buffet is unorthodox since they serve it to you at the table. This is good though as it ensures that all their servings are fresh from the kitchen.
The family that seems to own and run the restaurant are very charming and friendly. The price per person for a Chinese buffet is pretty reasonable. Recommend you try their steak and onions as the steak is very tender and the onion is perfectly cooked with just the right amount of crispness.
Their sugar donuts are to die for, especially when they make them fresh. Hot, bouncy, and light. It is simply to die for.
Simply put GuangZhou is an indulgent experience.

Chose this place because I saw on their website they had lunch buffet and I was in the mood to chow down. This place wont win any awards for fancy décor and the dining area was pretty plain and reminded me of a high school cafeteria. Good thing I wasn’t there to check out the hippest trends in restaurant design. I walked in and was seated and given a plate, I then looked around for the buffet line but couldn’t find one. I was confused until a waitress came around with a bowl of fried rice asking me if I wanted some. Captain obvious chimed in my head and said they must bring stuff out to you instead of you going up to a buffet line. Make sure you look at whats on the «buffet» when you come in as it is posted next to the kitchen door. The food was very good and fresh, but being a buffet I’d rather pick and choose what and how much of something I want instead of saying yes or no every 3 minuets when they came around with something new.

Really enjoy this place. Friendly staff. Fresh hot food. I love how every time the grandmother will try to fill you up on fried chicken right when you sit down. My family calls this place fried chicken. Just because she comes out saying fried chicken. Want some fried chicken. You’re not tricking me grandma. I’m saving the appetite for the good stuff. Noon to 1230 can be busy and you might have an empty plate. Not common enough to take a star away.

Had a combo meal of chow mein, fried rice, egg foo young (takeout) which was okay. Not the best and not the worst I’ve had. Gravy would be greatly improved by use of flour instead of cornstarch.
Also ordered hot sour soup, of which I’m normally a big fan. Not so with this stuff. For some incomprehensible reason, it was SWEET, and not in a good way. It tasted as though Hawaiian Punch had been dumped in it. Truly gross. I had two spoonfuls and dumped the rest.

There are a lot of Chinese restaurants around the Twin Cities. We live in NE Mpls and drive the 20 minutes or so to go to this one specifically. Why? Quality, freshness, and friendliness.
OK, the restaurant ambience is REALLY lacking. Frankly, it’s ugly, dated, situated next to a pawn shop, and looks just not great. But then the friendly services starts. We only go once a month or so but they know what we drink and bring it right over.
Once you order, they bring over a couple free cream cheese wontons which are just delicious and delicate while you wait for your food. My SO is trapped into always ordering the Szechuan style kung pao chicken as it’s so good and whenever we talk about going here, he knows exactly what he wants. I skip around the menu and have yet to hit a dud.
We’ve done the buffet twice. Yes, it’s reverse-​buffet style so there are plusses and minuses. The plusses are that the food is fresh, right from the kitchen as opposed to drying out on a chafing dish. There are also plenty of choices. Also, if Kenny O below would have actually read the menu board upon entering the restaurant, he would have known EXACTLY what was being served that day. So if you’re a vegetarian, you can skip the buffet and just order off of the menu. Negatives are t

Similar to Rose Garden in Coon Rapids, they serve the food fresh instead of being thrown under a heat lamp. The food is very good, good variety, and the prices can’t be beat. If you are in the Blaine/​Spring Lake Park area, you will not be disappointed. One of the better Chinese restaurants in the north metro.

This is by far the best Chinese food in the area.
Ignore the hipster vegetarian review above… he would complain about free help.

Ha, I couldn’t find this place on here, so i started to add it.
Then as I was adding it, I noticed it did pop up in the search results over on the side after a few minutes.
Someone else had already added it, but spelled it Zhao. Maybe I should copy my review over under that entry?
Meh.
Sort of like my rating for this place.
I thought it was OK, but not that great.
Sorry, but my review is going to be mainly complaints!
First off, I will admit my ignorance. I came with a group for lunch, and nobody told me, and I didn’t notice either, that I guess the «buffet» options are posted somewhere?
I didn’t learn that until the next day, when I saw some of the reviews online.
So yeah, me being kind of slow on the uptake ;-) as our group starts to sit down, a nearby server asks if we are all having the buffet, and we all say yes.
(l’m used to the kind where you get up and get your own food).
All of a sudden some lady comes over with a bowl of Goop and says «Anyone want any more Something Chicken?» And i’m like «What the???»
Then suddenly i catch on = Oh, they come around and serve you!
Then all of a sudden i realize, well how the He** can i know what choices they have?
So i wait a few minutes until different people come around with different choices — all some kind of meat of course, then i ask if they have anything that doesn’t have any meat in it, and they say No, But you can order from the menu.
Which is fine with me; they had a couple veggie items.
One thing i don’t understand is how other reviewers rave about how fresh and hot everything is — Why assume that because it’s hot? You don’t really know that! I’m sure they have all the same buffet stuff behind closed doors — other buffets are just as fresh and hot — they make more as stuff runs out — exactly the same as this place! Except here you can’t see what they are doing behind those kitchen doors.
Anyway, hope that wasn’t too offensive or anything!

Great food, great prices. I enjoy the pan fried noodles, sesame chicken, cream cheese puffs, etc.

GO THERE! The bottom line: 1. Flavors are layered, complex and scrumptious. Believe me on this one. This is high caliber cooking… absolutely. 2. Portions are huge. 3. Prices are crazy cheap (I hope they don’t go out of business because of undercutting themselves). We have only had take out, but I hear they have an incredible lunch buffet for only $ 6.15. What we’ve eaten: Szechuan Kung Pao Chicken — perfect. Sesame Chicken (which I ordered ‘spicy’) –so good. Tons of veggies including carrots, mushrooms, onions, cabbage, celery, water chestnuts, peapods. Regular Chow Mein: I thought this was a bit too thin — –too much sauce and too little substance, however the flavor was excellent. Cheese wontons: best I’ve ever had… and my husband agrees. Then, the first time we ordered take out, they threw in some of their homemade doughnuts for FREE! They were delicious. Last night, they threw in some egg rolls for FREE… they list two kinds of egg rolls on their menu, and I don’t know which ones these were, however, they were very different from anything I’ve ever had, and by far the BEST of anything I’ve ever had.
I also cast my «clean freak» eye (inherited from my mom) around the dining room, and the place looked pretty doggone spotless.
You. Must. Go. There.
And no I don’t work there (probably sounds like it from the way I’m gushing), but we do live a mere two miles from there, have lived this close for 21 years and just now have discovered it. I feel like I’ve somehow «lost» 21 years of my life.

After reading the good reviews here I was eager to try this restaurant out. It’s definitely a hole in the wall type of a place and I was very unimpressed by the food. My meal seemed average at best and was very heavy and greasy, which I expect to a point, but it seemed much more filling than typical Chinese. Unfortunately, I’m not planning on returning.

This place is nothing special. Its no different than all of the other «Americanized» asian restaurants out there. Their meat is your typical low quality chunks doused in sauce. Its hard to chew and definitely not reheatable. The fried rice is very hard and tasteless. It also has multiple kinds of meat scraps mixed in which kind of grossed me out. The egg rolls were nothing out of the ordinary as were the cream cheese puffs. The chicken wings were a strange non-​chicken wing shape and were hard and chewy. They did throw in free donuts but to be honest I’ve never quite understood the connection of donuts and asian cuisine. I’d rather spend more money on authentic asian food. Price means nothing if the food is nothing special. Those of you familiar with Hopes chinese down the road can put this place in the same category as Hopes. Neither are authentic or worth spending your money on. For the record we ordered the following: sesame chicken, sweet and sour chicken, egg rolls, chicken wings, cream cheese puffs and fried rice.

This place gets 5 stars based on the food and what you pay for it, not the ambiance. If you are looking for a place to impress the Donald Trump’s in your life, this is not it. If you are looking for some really good Chinese food, lots of it and at a price that is lower than most any Buffet you will find anywhere ($ 5.95 lunch!), this is it.
The lunch is an all-​you-​can-​eat lunch, but like a previous reviewer said, they bring the food around and you choose what you want. Everything I had was delicious, and I tried most all of it! It’s home made there, not some package of something that came off a Oriental Foods truck and was just heated up. The food is hot because it comes straight from the kitchen. It’s not picked over, like it can get at a buffet… good ratio of meat to veggies. The service was good. I have a couple of suggestions for this establishment: offer White Rice (maybe they do… I didn’t ask) as well as the fried rice AND serve the rice first, maybe in a bowl before bringing the food around. I like my food on rice and I had about 5 different options on my plate before the fried rice came around. Also, someone else mentioned the 2 faced card concept… I thought the same thing, good idea.

The reviews are accurate that the place doesn’t look like much, but it’s pretty typical that is often the case with good Chinese restaurants. There is no buffet here, but the food is served like Fogo de Ciao where they walk around with bowls and just scoop some onto your plate.
It’s a cool concept and the food was always hot. One thing I would recommend is that they adopt the two faced card so that you’re not constantly being interrupted by them asking if you want more food. It was a little difficult to carry on a conversation because of it.
The food wasn’t fantastic, but it was always hot. The wontons were very good as were the donuts. The sweet/​sour chicken was probably my favorite main dish.

The reviewers aren’t wrong. This is one of the better chinese restaurants in the cities. It doesn’t look flashy or have anything special outside but the food is suprisingly good. Also I didn’t go for their lunch buffet, but everything else on the menu was very cheap so it wasn’t necessary. Regardless of what you order they give you complimentary cream cheese wontons to start and fresh slices of oranges to finish. Not too shabby!
Food comes out piping hot and dishes are tastier than most of the bland flavors other restaurants have. Huge plus. The service is also quite good and quick but probably because the restaurant was pretty empty when we were there Tuesday evening. That shouldn’t stop you from going there and giving it a shot.

Absolutely amazing. The food is great and fresh. Instead of leaving the food on a buffet table to get cold and crusty, they bring it around in bowls and dish out portions for you. They had a shrimp dish, a steak dish, and about ten other dishes for you to try. For $ 5.75/person, you really can’t go wrong!
The staff is super cute, too. My boyfriend wanted me to get some of the shrimp dish so he could have a bite, so I did. After taking one of my shrimp, he asked for some from the lady anyhow. When I joked that he was stealing all of my shrimp, she put a few more on my plate. :) I can’t wait to go again.