The Square Restaurant, Novotel Max Yangon

This is probably the most frequented restaurant in the hotel. The daily free breakfast buffet is here and they have daily lunch and dinner buffet too. Initially, as I didn't know the options in the other restaurants, I frequented here for all my meals.

Buffet here is quite average with limited choices except for their special dinner buffet on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Breakfast buffet could be pretty boring when you have them for five days in a row. The only interesting part would probably be their gigantic fresh orange juicer which involves tumbling a whole tray of fresh oranges, skin and all, into the machine and it would squeeze out the juice from the whole fruit.

Lunch buffet would be a repeat of the breakfast with the addition of more mains instead of the usual breakfast fare. The same for dinner except that on Wednesday, you get fresh sashimi and lots of seafood on top of the usual fare. They even have a band on Wednesday. For alcohol lover, there's always free beer during their dinner buffet but Wednesday include free wine both red and white.

My first dinner here was ala carte as I wasn't feeling too good to enjoy buffet food. However, it was quite disappointing. The soup was bland and clumpy, and their salad dressing was horrible! I think I ordered the vegetable cream soup or something like that. To be fair, the salad came with the club sandwiches I ordered but I would have preferred having none of it if they tasted like that. The sandwiches was alright. For something that cost nearly USD20-25, I would have expected better.

Unless your food is sponsored, I wouldn't recommend having your dinner here on other days except on their special buffets.

Royal Pavillion Chinese Restaurant, Novotel Max Yangon

As one of the in-house restaurants in Novotel Max Yangon, this joint looks nice and has a lot of Chinese-inspired decorations and furnishings. The buffet at USD22 per pax for unlimited dimsum and Chinese dishes seemed quite reasonable compared to the other buffets in the hotel.

The buffet menu boasts of quite a selection and I couldn't resist taking a few photos before our meal. I went with my colleagues although not all of them decided to take the buffet as it was not Halal.

I was anticipating a rather good meal because of the promising menu and their service was again pretty impressive with the waiter helpfully giving some recommendations. Following his advice, we let him have free rein in ordering but I regretted that decision once the food arrived. To be fair, I was still nursing a tender stomach after a bad bout of food poisoning before the trip but my colleague and I found the dimsum underwhelming.

Granted, aesthetically the food look very appealing but upon taking a few bites, we shared a few similar complaints. The skin of most of their dimsums are slightly too thick and chewy, their seasonings are too sweet as to savoury and some are too bland. I'm not sure whether our requirements are a little too high but dimsum joints in Malaysia generally boasted a better quality.

Oh oh and their roasted meat were quite disappointing. The roast pork lacked the requisite crackling skin and had quite hard, crunchy ones; the roasted sweet pork slightly too cloying and sweet and the duck was passable at best.

All the same, this place has excellent service but might need some work on their products. Will I revisit? Maybe...but maybe for their stir-fried dishes?