17 Golden Corral Buffet Items You Should Always Skip

For the uninitiated, it's not all that hard to have a bad time at a Golden Corral. What makes the restaurant chain appealing is its wide selection of food at a low price point — absent from that equation is any sort of commitment to quality. Almost half of the Mashed ranking of the 20 most popular Golden Corral menu items, for example, consists of foods that are best avoided.

Beyond those buffet items that are of poor quality despite their popularity, the following is a list of the biggest disappointments from the Golden Corral buffet. In order to come up with my picks, I tried as many buffet items as I could across multiple trips to my nearest location. Every single one of these foods personally disappointed me, hence earning a spot on this list. With that said, here are the 17 buffet items that you should skip when you eat at Golden Corral.

Nothing's for certain in the weird and sometimes wild world of Golden Corral. Unusual items can become highlights of a meal, while dishes that might seem impossible to mess up can turn out to be incomprehensibly bland. I found that Golden Corral's scrambled eggs were a case of the latter.

It's hard to pinpoint the flavor that so aggressively put me off of Golden Corral's scrambled eggs, but it's perhaps best described as a bad egg flavor — not within the normal bounds of how eggs should taste, but a slight off note. That said, it was subtle, buried under a pervasive blandness. But blandness is still off-putting in its own way. And sure, it's possible to season bland scrambled eggs, but that bad note will still linger beneath any quantity of salt. Golden Corral's take on what should be a relatively simple dish is just gross enough to warrant avoiding.

I don't know that I've ever had hash browns quite as bad as the ones I tried from my local Golden Corral buffet. Technically, hash browns don't have to be any more complicated than crisped up shreds of potato. Although what I got from Golden Corral did indeed consist of potato shreds, that requisite crispiness was absent altogether. Instead, the potatoes were repulsively damp.

What ruined these hash browns even further was a lack of the umami flavor that typically comes from a potato of even baseline quality. Rather, just like the scrambled eggs, their flavor was somewhere between bland and weird. Virtually nobody is ever going to want to eat a pile of wet potato that tastes kind of bad, and that's exactly how I'd describe the Golden Corral hash brown recipe. Other than the scrambled eggs, opt for anything else from Golden Corral's breakfast buffet instead.

Amidst salad bar fixings and even some deli-style prefab salads at my Golden Corral was a platter of deviled eggs. I'm not a deviled egg fanatic by any means, but I thought this would likely make for a decently pleasant bite. Lesson learned.

Typically, deviled eggs pretty much just consist of mashed up hard boiled egg yolks mixed with mayonnaise and/or mustard. Instead of either of those standard condiments, the taste at the forefront of my Golden Corral deviled egg was a pronounced sweetness. I can't say that my deviled egg committed any further crimes than that, but I found out the hard way that a sweet deviled egg is criminal in and of itself. There was what looked like some visible paprika on top of the eggs as well, but that was just for show, because all I got out of this was sugary egg. Avoid at all costs.

Back to those deli-style prefab salads near the salad bar: They're mostly not great. To start, I did enjoy my potato salad, but I found the Golden Corral mac salad to be simply forgettable. The seafood salad, however, was actively off-putting. The base of Golden Corral's seafood salad is a relatively standard coleslaw. Amidst the cabbage it houses bites of what I believe to be imitation crab of various shapes and sizes. 

Texturally my imitation crab was a touch rubbery, and even worse was an apparent unpleasant seafood flavor. Paired with a recurring villain in the Golden Corral buffet — sweetness where I would have preferred none — my experience with the crab salad was negative across-the-board. Plus, even if crab and vegetables are relatively healthy, the quantity of mayo coating everything in the dish nullifies a good deal of their benefits. Do yourself a favor and go for the potato salad instead.

Maybe you don't like potatoes so you avoid the potato salad. And you know the seafood salad is funky and the mac salad is boring. Golden Corral's carrot salad might look like an interesting alternative on its surface, but its bright colors are just masking disappointment.

Making up the carrot salad are shredded carrots, raisins, an orange-ish fruit I believe could be tangerine, and plenty of mayo. The reason I'm not even certain of the extra fruit's identity is because this salad tastes like even less, somehow, than the sum of its parts. It's also — unsurprisingly at this point — weirdly sweet. In total, it's a mess of slightly tough raw carrots, negligible fruits, and sort of sweet mayo. Simply put, I'd take a flavorless baby carrot or serving of broccoli over this actively strange salad. So, if the bright oranges and yellows of the carrot salad are calling to you, don't let yourself be deceived.

As I was gradually progressing through the Golden Corral buffet from the salad bar to the desserts, the pot roast ended up being the first proper entree I tried. It looked nice and tender at a glance. After my disappointments with deviled eggs and salads, I was looking forward to a hearty serving of meat and potatoes. My optimism was tragically misplaced.

Rather than tender beef, I would describe the pot roast's as sad, wet meat. Between the beef, the veggies that accompany it, and even the sauce that coats everything, I picked up no notable flavors — it all tasted like so little that sogginess was at the forefront. For what it's worth, Golden Corral serves some decent meats, like fried chicken or its signature Bourbon Street Chicken dish. Since meat is actually a solid category for Golden Corral on the whole, avoid the pot roast at all costs.

Surely a good ol' burger should be a safe option at Golden Corral. At a buffet full of American classics, it might seem reasonable to assume that the food most synonymous with America might turn out at least kind of okay. The Golden Corral steak burger is, unfortunately, not even at least kind of okay.

First of all, rather than buns, Golden Corral serves its burgers on a bread that's closer in character to a dinner roll. It's dense and unwieldy, and houses a negligible slice of cheese and a fat beef patty. Normally a lot of beef is a good thing on a burger, but this is no ordinary beef. It's bad. Each bite is an explosion of bland meat and too much bread, bringing a rare worst-of-both-worlds approach to the art of burger-craft. Once again, get a piece of fried chicken or something else instead, because the steak burger is downright unpleasant.

To be fair to Golden Corral's baked fish with lemon herb sauce, I didn't have high hopes for it going in. Good seafood is more of a high-end buffet thing. What made me think it had a chance was that lemon herb sauce, which could have masked some subtler issues. It didn't.

It's maybe worth clarifying that, while I ate quite a few flavorless dishes during my Golden Corral trips, I found plenty of flavor in dishes like fried okra, steak fries, fried chicken, and plenty more. So I'm fairly sure it wasn't an issue on my end that I found the baked fish with lemon herb sauce to be yet another Golden Corral dish that didn't taste like much of anything. That said, I also picked up a slight fishiness, worsened by a mealy texture — seemingly a combination of bad breading and low quality fish. Either avoid the seafood at Golden Corral entirely or take the safest route and opt for something fried.

Carbs are cheaper than meat — lowering meat quantity and adding some carbs, for instance, is one of 14 retro hacks to cut down on food costs. It stands to reason then, that an all-you-can-eat buffet like Golden Corral is full of carbs that cost the restaurant less than meat-heavy dishes. Some of them are pretty okay, like the french fries and sweet potato casserole. One carb best avoided is the cornbread.

The biggest detractor to the quality of Golden Corral's cornbread is its overly crumbly texture. While cornbread can pair well with other dishes like soup, for example, that crumble factor makes it a little harder than usual to dip. Combined with a density that may be standard for the dish but serves to worsen its absence of corn flavor, there's no reason to grab a slice of cornbread from the Golden Corral buffet when better alternatives are offered nearby.

With cornbread out of the picture, rice might seem like a good carb alternative to try, especially since it's so easy to combine with other food items. Golden Corral's nonspecific yellow rice, in fact, is pretty good. But the Mexican rice is a major letdown. While an authentic Mexican rice recipe is amply spiced and seasoned, there's not really a standard of what should be included to qualify as Mexican rice. 

Visually, it's apparent that the Golden Corral recipe uses various kinds of veggies and at least a few different spices. That's all for naught, though. Those spices aren't necessarily negligible, but the hearty tomato and spicy chili that often define Mexican rice dishes are buried underneath a pervasive blandness. I found that tension between the subtlest of flavors and a more prominent nothingness to be genuinely off-putting, further worsened by a buffet-standard but still disappointing dryness.

There were two kinds of roasted red potatoes at my Golden Corral buffet: one that was no more than roasted red potato halves, and another called Italian potatoes. The latter was pretty clearly the former with the addition of Italian spices. Avoid both.

Since Golden Corral basically doesn't season veggies, the big chunks of red potato are particularly unwieldy. They quickly become mealy and expand in the mouth, tasting like very little and lingering for longer than they're welcome. Surprise, surprise — the seasoning on the Italian potatoes added virtually nothing, making them a reprise of the roasted red potatoes I had already tried. Better potato options like french fries and a sweet potato casserole make the roasted red potatoes irrelevant. Between a particularly unpleasant eating experience and their superior cousins, there are ample reasons to skip any and all roasted red potatoes at the Golden Corral buffet.

While I tried not to take the condition of each food item I tried into consideration — some dishes sitting out for a little while is understandable at any buffet, really — I do think it's worth mentioning that when I tried the mac 'n' cheese at Golden Corral, the tray appeared to still be untouched. Even though I got my mac as fresh as could be, I still thought it was pretty gross tasting.

At first, the most prominent flavor was semolina. Somehow the noodles tasted like more than the cheese sauce coating them. Not great. Then, some sort of sour aftertaste emerged, significantly worsening the experience. Like hamburgers, mac 'n' cheese seems like it should be something that a place like Golden Corral would do well. As it turns out, that couldn't be further from the truth. Somehow, Golden Corral's version isn't simply bland but actively repulsive.

When I tried Golden Corral's creamed spinach, the serving tray was pretty much untouched, just like the mac 'n' cheese. But I don't think, in this case, that meant it was fresh. I'd hazard a guess that most Golden Corral customers are just savvy enough to skip the creamed spinach altogether.

First thing's first: My creamed spinach was not entirely flavorless. Rather, I picked up a pretty prominent raw spinach flavor. The cream component that should have accented the spinach, however, was negligible, doing little more than making the spinach leaves wetter. Simply put, I'd rather eat plain spinach with no dressing than Golden Corral's creamed spinach. Whereas the former isn't all that pleasant, it's similar yet without an oddly wet texture. Overall, I'd describe vegetables as one of Golden Corral's weaker categories, but even taking that into account, my creamed spinach was of a particularly low quality.

The creamed spinach is a bit of an anomaly among Golden Corral's vegetable dishes, because most of the chain's veggies are simply boiled and served unseasoned. That applies to the carrots, corn, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and others still. All of those veggies are underwhelming but they aren't actively off-putting. However, the one boiled veggie I did find to be genuinely objectionable was the yellow squash.

What ruined it for me was that I found its natural squash flavor — entirely unimpeded with zero seasoning, of course — to be strange and undesirable. While not nearly as strong, it had some of the same vegetal quality present in a raw pumpkin. Nobody wants to feel like they're eating a raw pumpkin. So, even if they're all pretty far from ideal, go for one of the many boiled veggie alternatives like carrots, corn, or broccoli before dipping into Golden Corral's yellow squash.

Desserts are a somewhat safe bet at Golden Corral — I didn't find anything to be actively repulsive on the level of, say, my deviled egg or hash browns. And some desserts are pretty good, like the carrot cupcake, which topped the Mashed list of Golden Corral desserts ranked from worst to best. But this is still a budget-oriented all-you-can-eat buffet chain we're talking about, so some desserts are still plenty disappointing.

One of my most notable disappointments from the dessert department was a mini churro. The one thing it got right was the sort of chewy, sort of crunchy texture that's key to a good churro. Beyond that, though, I found it stale and bland, such that the meagerest quantity of cinnamon sugar was fighting for attention with a flavor black hole. It won't ruin your day, but there's still no reason to pick up a mini churro at any point during your Golden Corral meal.

Golden Corral's chocolate pudding is one of a few pudding desserts, alongside items like bread pudding and banana pudding. Before trying each of these, I expected to like my serving of good ol' chocolate pudding the most. As it turned out, just like with my mac 'n' cheese and my steak burger, I was kind of shocked at the extent to which Golden Corral messed up something so straightforward.

The main thing going on with the Golden Corral chocolate pudding is a lack of sweetness. It tastes like chocolate, but more like a plain cocoa powder than a chocolate bar. Absent is sufficient sugar and even a milky creaminess that elevates a good milk chocolate. Because of its strangely non-dessert character, it kind of just becomes a wet mush, losing any and all sense of indulgence. Especially when the banana pudding is pretty okay, the Golden Corral chocolate pudding is an automatic skip.

My experience with Golden Corral's peanut butter cookies was strange from the get-go. While it's not super apparent in the photo, the buffet's tray of peanut butter cookies was covered in a visible layer of granulated sugar that made me think I was grabbing a snickerdoodle. I didn't even realize my mistake until I was a couple bites into what I thought was a bland snickerdoodle, because the peanut butter flavor came through so subtly.

Worsening matters was a pervasive staleness. Even a very good three-ingredient peanut butter cookie recipe can end up a little dry, so that natural dryness combined with an absence of strong peanut butter flavor and an off-putting lack of freshness added up to a pretty lackluster cookie experience. On the bright side, this was the only bad cookie I tried from Golden Corral's dessert section. So, opt for really any option other than the peanut butter cookie.

My Golden Corral opinions are all based on visits to my nearest location in Henderson, Nevada, adjacent to Las Vegas. I patronized this location on two consecutive days, doing my best to methodically eat my way through as much of the buffet as was humanly possible. Inevitably, I skipped a small number of items — some of which, for instance, I noticed were put out in sections I had already visited, meaning the buffet's selection was changing in real time.

Nevertheless, I tried more than 60 distinct Golden Corral buffet items and took notes on each of them. Based on those notes, I then rounded up the worst of the worst for the sake of determining my list of buffet items I think customers should skip. At no point did Golden Corral have any indication that either of my visits was for the sake of a review and not just my own nourishment.