Nicole B.
Yelp
I came here with my family due to my relatives craving their hand pulled noodles that people rave about. I hadn't heard of Xi'an Gourmet House before and wished I had looked on Yelp before arriving because their dishes do look really good, and I wish I would've looked to know what to order. Their menu isn't very descriptive nor did they have many pictures, so we quickly ordered 1 beef hand pulled noodles and 2 homemade beef ma shi noodle soup as others were waiting behind us to order.
I didn't know what the ma shi noodles was- I just assumed it was a popular noodle dish since it was at the top of the menu and it had "homemade" in the name. Once our food came out though, we were quickly disappointed. I guess we didn't notice the word "soup" in the name, because it came out as a huge bowl of very very hot broth. 3 of us burnt our tongues trying to eat it, and although we sat there for awhile waiting for it to cool down (even going to buy appetizers at other restaurants), the broth never cooled down even enough to be an eating temperature. It was just too hot to eat for any of us that we had to pack it to go- which wasn't exactly easy either. Imagine packing a whole bowl of soup into a small container- it spilled everywhere. We contemplated just leaving it and not even taking it to go, but that would've been a waste of our time and money considering we took no more than 5 bites from each bowl.
The beef hand pulled noodles was more appetizing but it'd be a huge stretch to call it good. I found that the dish had way too much noodle and not enough beef to go with all the noodles. My picture is deceiving as it looks like there's a lot of beef, but the beef was just in big chunks (wish they cut it more) at the top, and there's plenty of noodle underneath. The noodles were long and thick making it hard to cut to eat, so you just had to bite into it and rip the remaining from your mouth. I found this makes the dish very hard to share in addition to being hard to eat. It was very dry. There's sauce at the bottom of the bowl, but I wish it had been distributed through the whole bowl so that the top and middle of the dish wasn't so dry.
Now, aside from the food, the reason for the low rating and why I was extremely disappointed in my meal was the service. Honestly, the food was probably so unimpressive to me because I was already disappointed that I probably had preconceived opinions that the food wouldn't be good. We ordered immediately after my family did. We were right behind them in line. But they got their food after probably 15 minutes or so. And I'm giving a 2 star review rather than a 1 star because their food actually did look good and all 4 of them enjoyed and were very pleased with their meals. We were excited to get our dishes after seeing theirs. BUT we ended up waiting 45 minutes for our food. We stood there and stood there and nobody acknowledged us. We were confused why other people were being served their food who ordered after us. We saw to go meals being made. I was informed by my relatives that this place gets to go orders or people who call ahead a lot, so maybe that's why they were getting their food first. For this reason, we gave them the benefit of the doubt and remained patiently waiting. After 35 minutes of waiting though, we approached the cashier and asked about our food. We watched her speak to the kitchen who looked confused, then saw them grab a ticket from the counter and move it to the front of their orders. Nobody said a word to us and resumed doing their jobs. We stood there for another 10 minutes unacknowledged as we saw them make our food through the kitchen window assuring me that they did in fact forget about our order. We never received an apology. There was no acknowledgment regarding what happened or for the wait. We were just handed our food and that was it. We were not pleased, and we truly regretted even ordering food from here. It also made me wonder if our dishes came out the way they did because they were forgotten about and rushed? Their reviews are way too good. And the 3 other bowls my family ordered ahead of us were good so it can't be that their food is bad. It looks like we just had a bad experience hence why I'm giving at least 2 stars. But I wish we had gotten an apology at the very least or been acknowledged.