大三元 Crystal Seafood Restaurant Carlingford — Restaurant in Sydney

EXTREMEMLY POOR SERVICE!!! With Undisclosed additional costs! $20 charge for ordering additional dishes once the initial meals were consumed. They charged it as 'second course' on the bill. (If we knew we wouldnt have ordered the second time) Mind you we initially wanted to order more but the waiter advised us not to and said that we could just order more later if there wasn't enough food. The $20 charge was not disclosed at that time. At the start of the night we were told that a minimum of 3 different dishes had to be ordered. When ordering more food later on we were then told that an additional 2 dishes minimum if making a second order. The first restaurant we'd been to that had this rule! Waiter reluctantly provided 3 wine glasses for 6 people and even more reluctantly gave the additional 3 when asked a 3rd time. The table of men next to us didn't have that issue. The usual complimentary soup was not given until we asked for it. The table next to us did not have this issue. We had to nearly beg for some water which we had to walk over to get ourselves. No glasses were provided even when asked. At the end of the day the bill came to just under $350 for 6 ladies. So it was value for money considering we had 4 kgs crab and 3 side dishes but I would have been happy to pay more for better service. Service only picked up at the end when the bill came out. I did not make a fuss at the restaurant or dispute the extra charge and ordering conditions because it was my mum's birthday but we will never return again regardless of how cheap or nice...

Service: service is terrible. The staff are all disrespectful and disregard the concerns of the customers. We asked the staff for prawn chips multiple times and all times, they aggressively yelled back "no" and then proceed to give the table next to us some prawn chips. Furthermore, when waving at them to come over to help us, they avoided the table and took a longer route to avoid helping the customers. The restaurant is also severely understaffed, with only four staff members helping out upstairs. The staff was also very moody and was unwilling to help. Moreover, the employees were uncommitted to their jobs and did not take the initiative to accommodate for the customers, including the unwillingness to collect finished dishes. The food also took too long to arrive, the Thermos of rice took 30 minutes in itself to arrive and I find it ridiculous that the staff would spend 30 minutes scooping rice. The plates and cups were dirty and when we asked the staff to exchange them, they brought a pile of plates and made us choose ourselves.

Atmosphere: loud and rowdy. It's so loud in the restaurant even though there aren't many people.

Food: disappointing. Definitely not worth the price. The beans were undercooked and all the foods were too salty. The peanuts were covered in salt.

If I could give them zero...

Possibly the worst service I have had in my entire life.

My wife, child and in laws all went together to sit down and enjoy Yum Cha on a Monday at around 11am and we didn't receive any service once we had sat down for 10 minutes, not even a pot of tea to start.

We waited a full 25 minutes before the Yum Cha carts even came close to us and once we had ordered some dumplings, there was a dead bug on the side of one of the dishes. We flagged this up with one of the staff and they ended up just taking that away and asking if we wanted a replacement.

By this point the dead bug had made us all not want to eat anymore, but the dishes we had ordered earlier were coming after 45 minutes of waiting. We ended up just leaving these on the table and not eating them and were not offered a refund for those dishes.

I spoke to the manager/owner to tell him this was unacceptable and all he offered was a very meaningless 'sorry' without looking me in the eye and then pretended he had to go somewhere else and walked away.

So we still ended up paying the full amount even though the service was this shocking.

I have never been more disappointed and angry in my life with a meal and I really hope that they get their act together, as I'm sure they will get shut down...