Chili Hut — Restaurant in Calgary

Not recommend this restaurant at all! !😡😡

Food: All of us felt burnt stomach after the meal! Even though we ordered mild flavor for all the dishes because we have kids with us! That is ridiculous, since the spicy level is low but stomach burn happened, highly doubt they use capsaicin, which is not natural but harming spicy ingredient! (The adults are all spicy food lovers, usually we would order mid-spicy level, but this time we ordered mild because of kids; the burning stomach did not happened for another restaurant we just been to last week or even the food we made at home using purely chili pepper but nothing artificial).

Service: we waited for more than half an hour for the first dish to come. No explanation, no compensation to the delay. There were also loud complaints from kitchen (after the server passed the message to the chef). They have an odd serving sequence which is table-by-table (if you have a large order in front of you, you gonna wait forever🙃). While other restaurants they deliver dishes based on the common dishes they have in the orders and serve the common order first so customers don’t have to wait for a long time! Especially in the high-volume time. Not even that, we saw a table came after us got their dishes prior to us. There was no reason at all! We had children with us, can’t let them wait and starve!

The atmosphere: the restaurant is small and crowed, we can barely hear each other since other customers are too loud and we were being sited too close to the both the noise customers and the washroom.

They have underground parking, however it is not pick-up...

I've been here couple times, and the food is quite downturn a bit lately. They really need a smarter host and improve the service. They denied to sit my family and turned us away on August 1 recently, but the restaurant has 2 empty tables with 1 table party about to leave (they left shortly after while we are still at outside the restaurant). The staff told me they had 2 reservations, ok so what is the problem that they have to reject us, they have enough table after all.

When they denied us, the servers (1 male 1 female staff) yelled out from inside the restaurant that brought all the attention from the entire restaurant to us. All guests looked at us trying to see what's going on and we felt very embarassing. This left us a very bitter taste and super confused at that moment. We are a regular customer since before covid, and try to visit during covid too to support them. This makes me feel very bad personally and I don't think I will ever return.

We went to the Marco's restaurant next door and had a wonderful meal...

I would have given Chili Hut a 5 out 5 if they had lived up to the name Chili. The food was expertly prepared. The lamb with red chili and green onion was cooked to perfection and the eggplant with shredded pork was equally perfect. It was shy, however, of being an outstanding taste experience. Why you may ask? It is because the chilis were lacking. If a restaurant claims spicy, then make it spicy.

Too many restaurants cater to the boring non-adventurous prairie diet. In this case Chili Hut caters to the lowest common denominator, mildly spicy. If this would have been a restaurant in Chongqing there would have been fist fulls of dried red chilis lightly roasted.

I asked, in the instructions, for extra extra extra spicy. Either they do not read the instructions or are to afraid to prepare the food for those who understand what this food is all about. What I got was an expertly prepared...