Mandarin Garden Buffet

Eating out in Chilliwack takes a car, since the independent dining rooms are spread along the arterials rather than collected into a quarter anyone could walk. The downtown holds the highest concentration, in the blocks around Five Corners and in the District 1881 development on the old cattle sales site, which brought in a run of newer kitchens. Vedder Road through Sardis and Vedder has the greatest number of rooms overall, though most of them sit inside strip plazas where they are easy to drive straight past without registering that they exist. Out in Yarrow and Rosedale there are a few rooms that have outlasted several owners and justify the drive.

Neither a phone number nor a website is published, which is the awkward part of the entry. Hours, whether there is a lunch service, whether any buffet runs every day or only on some of them, and whether food can be taken away are all unrecorded, and none of it will be guessed at here. The compensating factor is where it sits. Anyone already in Sardis on other business is a minute or two from the corridor, and the cost of looking in person is close to nothing. A drive past tells you more in ten seconds than this record manages in a paragraph. That is how most people in Chilliwack come across the plaza restaurants in the first place.