Ginkgo Garden — Restaurant in Ottawa

The food is good and the prices are fair but they often fail to meet promised delivery and pickup times. Today we ordered online for pickup and were notified to arrive at 6:45 pm, but the food was not ready until 7:10.

On New Year’s Eve of 2024 we ordered food for delivery at 5:15, expecting delays, and we were told that it would arrive at 6:45. At 7:15 we called to check on the status and they did not answer the phone, not did they do so on subsequent attempts. At 9:15 they called to apologize, though they did not offer an explanation for the delay. We decided to cancel it. We had not prepaid.

My issue is with the lack of foresight. Surely they know that that for a certain number of orders they take it takes a certain amount of time to prepare and deliver them. They must have had an idea when we called at 5:15 what the actual delay would be. So why did they tell us it would be 90 minutes? And if there were extenuating circumstances that occurred after we called in our order, why did they not contact us at that time to let us know of further delays?

We will know better than to order from Ginkgo Garden again on nights when the demand is...

I am a regular at Ginko Garden and I've got an unfortunate task of reducing a formerly great review to "meh".

The value is still very good, and I will continue to buy from here, however, I have to say that I've noticed a very sharp decline in the food quality starting some time around Jan 24 2024. My usual dish is the crispy beef lunch special which I adored. Now it is barely noteworthy. The sauce is a bit different and lacks the same depth of flavour it once had. The rice is entirely different now and is extremely bland and consistently seems to be more mushy than it ever was. Their fried rice used to actually be a VERY strong part of the lunch special and it has dropped from 5* to barely being worthy of 3*.

I sincerely hope that this is a temporary change - perhaps the regular chef is away and someone new is filling in. If the food quality does not improve in the coming weeks, I may no longer visit here as...

I always order 1 combo for delivery yet this time when I did, the person on the phone kept telling me I needed to add more things for it to be available for delivery. Obviously i was caught by surprise because I always order 1 combo for delivery, so I asked “since when was this policy a thing?” And he goes “since yesterday”. I’m not dumb. I realized then that the last couple times I ordered combos, I ordered more than 1 because my family wanted to eat. So to think that they’d look at my order history and try to pull such a dirty move is sick. I just finished a 12h shift and was really craving this, but honestly after this encounter I’ve deleted this restaurant’s number from my phone and will simply no longer be buying from here. Insane what greed...