Star House Chinese Restaurant — Restaurant in Adelaide

I never thought I’d ever end up writing a one-star review for this place, but here we are. We’ve been coming here on and off quite a few years, and until tonight have always enjoyed excellent service.

It’s a Monday evening, Valentine’s Day, we arrived somewhere around 8:15 pm, to avoid the dinner time rush. Our order was taken in reasonably good time, but they seemed a little slow to deliver the drinks, and they forgot the house water that we asked for when we ordered. Never mind, maybe they were busy.

Meanwhile, 30 or so minutes later (arguably more like 45 minutes, but I can’t be absolutely certain)… and we hadn’t seen any of the food yet. This is really unusual for this place, which would normally serve within 15 minutes max. One of the managers came out and checked the docket, and explained that some of our dishes would take a long time to cook. Given the first dish was a stirfry with steamed pancakes, that seemed a bit odd, and in any case it probably would’ve been a good idea to tell us right up front if we’d ordered something that was going to take 45 minutes!

10 more minutes later and the stir-fry with pancakes came out - no sign of anything else though. Meanwhile, the table next to us had been cleared, new diners arrived, orders taken, and the food had started arriving.

We asked to cancel the reminder of our order, but they told us it was already being cooked. Really? By now it’s about an hour from when we placed our order. Another 10 minutes or so later, and our main meal arrives, but the fried rice is missing. Quite annoyed to see that the table next to us have received their fried rice already!

Okay, enough’s enough… I asked to speak to the manager, and instructed them to cancel our fried rice. Needless to say, we’d rather lost our appetites by this time.

We dine out a lot, and by ‘a lot’ I really mean a lot! We understand things can go wrong in the kitchen, orders can get misplaced or redirected, staff can go sick, anything can happen. Then, what should happen is the manager should come out and explain what’s happened, and apologise, and perhaps offer some complimentary drinks or something. But no, what we got was excuses about them being backed up in the kitchen, having a lot of takeaway orders to deal with, etc etc. No apology.

And that’s why they’ve only got 1 Star in this review, and an entry on our...

We have been here before with no issues. Last night's experience was shocking. I don't leave bad reviews buy after last night's experience and not being listened too I feel we have no choice. We were our for a special occasion got seated no problem but once that was done we then had trouble flagging down waitstaff to take our order. We finally got a hold of a waiter and ask for some steamed rice for our youngest. It never arrived she was in tears and crying because she was so hungry at this poin and had been waiting for so long, every staff member we flagged down would not serve us. We finally got a staff member to take our order after tables that came in after us had already been served and started getting food we re order the steamed rice that came out about 10 minutes later. The food we ordered came out very slowly and was not the best the fried rice was cold. we asked the waitstaff for clean plates but she couldn't speak English and just smiled and walked off. We finally got one helpful staff member that was able to get us clean plates and track down our missing order. My husband tried telling a staff member of the issue we were having but they walked away. At checkout we couldn't get anyone to give us our bill so we went to the front desk where we were charged for items we did not receive. Not long after both my husband and I felt sick, he has a MSG allergy and started to have an allergic reaction, he is still feeling sick the next day.

As a restaurant if you want to charged your customers mid to high prices make sure your service reflects those prices treat your customers with respect and...

Since 2019, my family and I come to this restaurant once in a while (every couple of months) for Yum-Cha on a Sunday Morning. However, as we have gradually come to this place, the prices have rapidly increased, which is fair as the cost of living (inflation) has caused the price of food to go up, however, the downside is that this restaurant's menu food items have gone down in terms of flavour and texture. While the price of the items has gone up, the deliciousness of the food items at the restaurant just slowly went bad. I'll state an example. The egg steamed custard buns used to be my favourite thing on the menu. However, when it came to my table, it was cold, and didn't have that flowy liquid that came out when you took your first bite! Additionally, to add, the XO Radish dish which was served to us was double the price, and the serving size was halved from the previous time I visited, I feel like this is not really the way to go because when you increase the price of an item, I expect you to somewhat either keep the same serving size, or make it a bit bigger. Side note! Back in early 2020, the most expensive 'SUP' item was $9.50, now it is $16.80!! Literally almost double the price!! Would not come here! My recommendations are either Empress near Glenside, or Ding Hao just around the back...