BBQ City — Restaurant in Adelaide

This Chinese restaurant in Adelaide has excellent food. Their roast duck and crispy pork are among the best I’ve ever had. I really wanted to love this place.

Unfortunately, one waitress ruined our experience. One of my friend ordered crispy pork and roast duck on rice, and I asked her to add one more for me. Instead, she brought barbecued pork and roast duck.

Mistakes happen, and we would have accepted the wrong dish. The real issue was how she handled the situation. The waitress did not repeat the order to confirm. When we pointed out the mistake, she didn’t apologize or clarify. Instead, she insisted she was right. She raised her voice and said things like, “I’m not wrong. You’re wrong. Don’t blame me.” And she also pointing her finger toward my friend. This upset us, especially since everyone at our table heard the order was for crispy pork, not barbecued pork.

What made this more disappointing was not just the error but the lack of professionalism and courtesy in handling it. In hospitality, mistakes can occur—I’ve worked as a server for three years, so I know that well—but how you respond is what matters. Instead of resolving the issue kindly, it became confrontational, which felt hostile and disrespectful.

My friend, a regular customer, left feeling upset and hesitant to come back. This was particularly sad because he always praised this restaurant before.

Your food is outstanding, and most of your staff are excellent. However, this one experience overshadowed everything. I believe you need more training to ensure situations like this are managed with professionalism, accountability, and basic courtesy. Without that, even the best food can be forgotten due to poor treatment.

Your food is exceptional, and most of your staff reflect the quality of your restaurant. But one person’s actions were enough to ruin that in one afternoon.

In hospitality, the standard is simple: mistakes can happen, but professionalism, accountability, and respect for customers are vital. These are the basics of the job.

At the end of the day, customers don’t just remember the food, they remember how they were treated. No matter how delicious the dishes are, respect and professionalism should never...

DO YOU WANNA GET SLIMED??? This is the place. Order anything with a selection of vegetables and you WILL receive slime. A friend and I stopped in here for a late lunch and were seated within seconds and thrown an array of menus from one of a few of the poor souls who wander between the tables of BBQ City. After paroosing the menu we ordered, one Beef and bitter melon lunch special ($9.50) and one SLIMED UP braised prawn with seasonal vegetables ($18.50). The meals arrived within 10 seconds as if they had been emptied from a can as the words of our order slipped fatefully from our lips. What a mistake; we pushed past the first few mouthfuls blaming our distaste for the intricately slimed meals on our uncultured and western raised sensibilities - Only to later realised we had been duped by the slime gods themselves. The $18 prawn meal I purchased was a slimy selection of about 7 average, dirty prawns on a pile of grade A slimed bok choy, with a few pieces of mushroom and carrot thrown in to appease and fool my feeble body's nutrition requirements. VERY SLIMY. My friends bitter melon meal was something otherworldly, a truly amazing dish which defied all logic and had been thrown together with the type of vigour with which one may wrap themselves in a towel upon exiting the shower on a particularly brisk morning. The bitter melon also presented an element of slime, peculiar but indeed present and certainly not welcome. The lychee juice drink was fine. Our service was capped off with our reluctant visit to pay for our meals, our hands clammy with slime we reached for our wallets to pay, only to find the cashier sucking vigorously on a bagged slime product at the counter, she proceeded to suck the product dry before our eyes as we watched in awe at the type of pure ignorance that one could only have utter respect for. It was only when the certified BBQ master in his corner prompted her; that she disposed of her slime package and tended to our needs, relieving us of our meagre dollars. We had been duped, we left. Disappointed, we strolled out, barely comprehending what we had just experienced, a sliming to remember, a...

Terrible experience. We ordered the 2 course Peking Duck and spoke at length with two waiters to ensure first that we could make the meal gluten free. We received the first course of duck and it was fine. The second course took a long time to arrive and when it finally did it had egg noodles. We asked the waiter to change to rice noodles to adhere to gluten free requirements and we were flat out told they couldn’t do it. This made us frustrated as we took precautions before ordering to ensure that the $43 Peking duck choice was not going to be a waste. After having to speak to two other waiters and a “manager”, we were explicitly told that we couldn’t have rice noodles. We explained that we wouldn’t have ordered the dish if we hadn’t been assured earlier that they could make the accommodations needed, but the waiter continued to argue with us that we needed to take the dish as is! Completely irritated and now no longer hungry, we asked if we could simply pay for the duck that we had eaten only, instead of for the full two courses and we were told no. Then when we asked to speak to the manager about our experience and we were told there actually was no manager. Then another man came to tell us they magically do have rice noodles and can actually make the dish as initially requested. By this time, we were incredibly fed up. We asked again to simply pay for what has been eaten and to leave promptly, however all three front of house staff were saying that we couldn’t just pay from what we’ve eaten because we’d already agreed to buy the two course meal. Terrible communication, rubbish hospitality, difficult and unpleasant interactions with staff. Don’t bother when the rest of Gouger St has so many more...