Today, the day before Father’s Day 2023, we had a big family lunch with my partner’s stepdad’s family with 4 generations present. The criteria for a place to eat was that it had to be something simple so that the Hungarian great-grandparents could easily find food to eat, was over their side of town and had a playground, which made Castello’s Pakenham International Buffet Hotel the perfect choice.
Apart from this being over an hour away from my house, I was pretty excited to try it out. I love all-you-can-eat restaurants and have covered a few defunct ones in the past on this blog, such as Smorgy’s All You Can Eat and the nearly dead Dine-In Pizza Hut Restaurants.
Castello’s Pakenham Buffet Menu
The Castello’s Buffet Menu on their website just shows the pricing for all-you-can-eat, it doesn’t tell you what they actually have.
- Pizza
- Pasta
- Roast Meat Carvery
- Prawns
- DIY Bao Buns
- Lasagna
- Shepherds Pie
- Salads
- Party Pies
- Mini Sausage Rolls
- Mini Samosas
- Curries
- Mexican food
- Ice Cream
- Puddings
- Cakes
- Fruit
And more!
Photos of Castello’s Pakenham International Buffet
Here are photos of most of the serving stations at Castello’s. I think I missed a few. It’s possible that they will have slightly different things each time you visit, but that’s a guess.
Pizza with salami, garlic bread, margherita
Here there is shepherd’s pie, chicken wing and legs, beef bolognese, some pasta and I think the top left might be squid.
Prawns and maybe some oysters and lemon slices? I don’t eat seafood so I didn’t pay attention.
I think this is various curries and stews, one of them was Greek. I didn’t eat any of this so I didn’t pay much attention.
Here’s the bao bun-making station. Excuse the random person serving things with their hands, they were not with us.
The dessert bar has various little cakes and slices.
Here is the fruit station and to the right there is chocolate mousse, cream etc and further around are various puddings. You can get ice cream added by a bartender.
Castello’s Pakenham Playground Photos
The playground here is quite large, bigger than the ones you’d see at McDonald’s. I was quite impressed. It was hard to get photos to demonstrate the size as I didn’t want to take photos of random kids, but the overall length is not seen in my photos.
This playground continues further to the right.
This was further to the right from the previous photo. My son is coming down a slide.
At the very right-hand side of the playground there is a helicopter area, here’s my son in that.
There were also a few video games that kids could play, a claw machine and a TV playing films. Disney’s The Princess and the Frog was playing when we were there.
Castello’s Pakenham Review
As an all-you-can-eat restaurant charging $38.90 per adult for lunches, I think the quality of food was reasonable. I didn’t have anything that seemed particularly poor quality or anything like that. It was all fine and I’d happily come here again. It was a great venue for a family event with older people and children.
