Padma V.
Yelp
It makes me so sad to update my pre-Covid, pre-GenZ, 2019 review on Hongs. We've been dining here for more than 15 years & have a particular tradition of having Christmas Eve lunch at Hongs before going to a movie. This year, the service was just a nightmare. I don't eat meat, but sometimes will celebrate with seafood. I love black bean sauce, but I can't eat bell peppers, so the prawns with black bean sauce on the menu requires some adjustment. Sometimes I ask if they can sub broccoli for the peppers. Today I asked if I could get the prawns w/ cashews and mixed vegetables (carrots, mushrooms, zucchini) w/ black bean sauce instead of whatever sauce it usually comes with. The server assured me it would be no problem. After waiting a very very looooong time for our meals to arrive -- people seated after us at a table next to us had soup, lettuce wraps & peking duck served before our entrees came out -- our dishes arrived. Mine was chicken with black bean sauce. I explained that this was not what I had ordered. The server looked confused, and did not bother to apologize for the mistake, but took the order back. (I had to explain that he should take the rice, too, b/c I did not want it cold later.) He came back out, while I was watching my partner eat, to say it would take 10 minutes. Eventually, he came back with a dish, but not the right one: prawns with black bean sauce, bell peppers, and added cashews.
As I was picking out the bell peppers and putting them on my partner's plate, another server came over, and I asked if I could have a menu (to check that I hadn't misunderstood what I'd ordered somehow) and if we could speak to a manager. In a minute or two, the manager came over, and I explained the whole situation. She did apologize, and said she'd take the entree off our bill. I then asked if I could have some steamed broccoli (in place of the bell peppers I can't eat). She suggested broccoli with garlic sauce, which sounded nice, so I said yes. A few minutes later came a plate of said broccoli, which I realized was the $20 entree portion I'd seen on the menu & thought "who would pay $20 for a plate of broccoli"? But I assumed she was just being generous because of the string of screw-ups. Nope. When our bill came, she had removed the prawn entree, but added the $20 broccoli with a 20% discount. So, $16 broccoli.
Now, I know I'm going to sound like my old GenX self here when I say that it seems to me that a lot of the problem comes down to the Gen-Z-ification of restaurants. Both the server and the manager fall into that generation. The manager explained the problem with the slowness in getting our meal (though why this didn't impact other tables I don't know) as having to do with the kitchen being "overwhelmed" with takeout orders. I've read recently that this has a lot to do with GenZ having door dashed themselves through the Covid pandemic. Restaurants are struggling to keep up with the timing requirements of delivery services while also accommodating dine-in customers, who are often older and, they assume, more complaint. The upshot here is that the manager seems not to have been able to keep the kitchen functioning efficiently on both tracks, in-person dining and takeout. Likewise, the server really seems to have had no idea what constitutes "good service." Like, he wasn't trying to be rude or inattentive. He seems to have just not known to check in on customers, apologize for errors, expedite corrections, etc.
I know it's Christmas Eve, but the restaurant wasn't busy at all. We got there not long after it opened. There were 4 active tables in our section (1 top, 2 2 tops, 3 top), and one 5 top in the larger dining area. There were 3 servers. So, you know, they were hardly overwhelmed enough that, e.g. our soup should have been lukewarm when we got it. But it was, and we let that go because it was tasty. And we were hungry. One woman server did seem to keep tabs on everything. She initially took our drink order & got us a refill, and takeout containers at the end of the meal (when our server proper was assiduously avoiding us). And, again, the tables around us, 2 of which were seated after us, were getting all kinds of food promptly. So, this was no holiday frenzy issue. And, as a holiday premium, we had to order from the dinner menu at dinner prices, which resulted in a $68 bill for tea, 1 entree we wanted & 1 we didn't know we were ordering, plus $8.50 each for the rice & soup combo option.
As we waited though the lousy service, we reminisced about the now-retired head waiter, who used to run the dining room at Hong's with an efficiency & graciousness that is clearly the stuff of bygone days. I cannot remember the last time I left no tip. But this time I zeroed it out. And it kind of broke my heart. I hope this was just a one-off, bad, bad, horrible, awful day experience. Because we would hate to have to close the door on what has been a favorite spot for many years.
