Melanie B.
Yelp
3.5. Customer service needs some work.
Most of the food was tasty, but service was a bit lackluster.
We ordered:
Crispy beef: crowd pleaser. Indeed crispy. Definitely sweet & savory.
Mama's chowmein: thicker noodles. Good mix of veggies. Some meat. Solid noodle choice.
Beef rolls: I've had these before and it had less flavor (hoisin?) today. The beef was also very thin, less of it, and not nearly as freshly cooked as the last time.
Cauliflower: cauliflower was cooked well. Sauce was very little but flavored the dish well. What I wasn't expecting was very, very thinly sliced Taiwanese sausage. I was expecting more like shredded pork/crispy pork as I've had at Rainbow Kitchen. Definitely much better at RK.
Mapo tofu: we asked for less spicy and it was perfect.
XLB: one of my favorite things is XLB (soup dumplings). I was so excited to try it here. Big miss. The dumplings were tiny, no soup, filling was crumbling as in not held together like a meatball, and the skins were dry on top. Worst thing: the filling had no flavor.
Cons: quite a few of our dishes came with a small fork or tiny spoon instead of a serving spoon. It doesn't seem like much of a con, but when you start forking mapo tofu onto a plate and realize it'll take you 15 minutes just to get enough on there, it becomes hilarious...and then an annoyance once you realize almost EVERY dish has a tiny utensil. When we asked to change them out, our server said they were out. What?!? He said that they were all dirty and were being washed. Okaaaaay. Perhaps, work on timing of clean silverware when you have a full house of patrons?
Also, we had to ask a few times for water and sliced ginger for our XLB. At first our server said they didn't have any...and then that the cooks were too busy to cut it. What?!? How do you serve XLB without ginger?!? Uuuugh. When I asked him that, he finally went in the back and got some ginger. On top of that we also had to ask for the tiny sauce holder for the vinegar, ginger, chili oil mix to dip the XLB into.
Not sure I'll be back anytime soon, but hope that the service and timing of essentials like appropriate silverware improves.