Avery Cafe — Restaurant in Richmond

I went there twice and I must say that their food is the best HK style cafe in Vancouver, such as the Roast Pork Kruckle, deep fried pork chop, baked pork chop on rice, the Lobster Soup and their standard RED soup as well. However, the drinks are no good. Having said that, their service is HORRIBLE, a waitress (I assume she is the leader) has a very rude attitude. I phoned in to make a table reservation of 12 ppl, when we arrived, she gave us a rectangular table by putting together 4 tables, which are good for 2 ppl each and force us to sit in for 12 ppl. I rejected right away and suggested to give us 3 tables + 1 big round table so that we can all sit comfortably for a fine dining experience. After we site, she only gives us 3 menus to share and then took 1 away from us after 1 min and said she needed to give it to other table. Afterwards, while she was taking the order for the 8th person, she suddenly said that she needed to go and serve other table first because the other table has been waiting too long..... we are all shocked to hear about this and we rejected her request and asked her to keep going, but she left us anyway without apologies.... She came back after 5 mins to continue the order and when the ordering is done, we asked her to print a ordering list for us to review first because we are not sure if the order is taken correctly.

While we are checking the order one by one, we discovered that one of the orders in upgrading into a Lobster soup with pastry did not show up properly, but printed with "rice noodle +$3.5". We told the waitress and she insists that it is correct but because of computer limitation, it cannot be displayed properly. When the soup arrived, it was a white soup with pastry so we told the waitress that we have upgraded to a lobster soup with pastry instead. Then she insisted that she is right and WE are the one who is making the mistake!! We then explained to her about we have already reminded her about the error we spotted on the ordering list but she kept urging that she is right and WE ARE WRONG!! this is the exact wordings she said. After we keep insisting, she agreed to change it for us. You know what, after those exhausting moment we have to fight for what we need, such as we've to keep reminding the waitress in getting enough utensils and how many number of soup is missing, etc, our dinner has been totally mess up! Those young waitress are nice but they are all inexperience and not able to give you an instant support. When we all finished our main dish, there is still one order of Lobster soup with pastry missing (we upgraded 5 orders), when we checked with the same waitress, she said because we have made a mistake so now we have to wait for much longer!! I would say if the owner see my comment here, he/she should fired that lady right away and hire some better waitress and provide them with...

Let me start off by saying that I used to come to avery quite frequently and some of their old staff were lovely. But after today's experience I will never come back here again. Today I visited during lunch hour and when we arrived there were only 3 other tables seated (one large group and 2 smaller groups), we sat and ordered quickly but for the next 35 minutes there were NO FOOD being served except a free soup and drink that comes with the meal. The whole time no one came to attend us, we just sat there and watched more people coming in...When we noticed another table that was seated after us getting their food first we asked the waitress how long do we have to wait. The first waitress said she will check but did not even come back to us. Then we asked a second waitress (she has reddish orange hair) and explained that we have plans later, she just yelled at us 'it's coming' while serving at another table, but we were still waiting. We ended up decide to leave and headed to the counter to pay for the drink that was served, but the red haired lady was really angry about it and were talking to us angrily. I told her we waited for so long and no one even said anything to us the whole time, she said 'can't you see that we have a large group here?' As if it's the customers problem... when we were talking at the counter the food finally came out and we agreed to take it as a take out, the red haired waitress was also talking angrily while packing our food and gave so much attitude towards us. We ended up asked for change as we decided not to tip (she took our money without giving us change), then she proceeded to say we already served you. Where is the service when we received no food?? By service do you mean the part where you were giving us attitude when we started asking where is our food? Because no one really served us until we started to ask for our food, and look at the results we got. To the lady who said to us 'this is not mcdonalds', i can assure you that i have never had such a bad experience or met rude staff at mcdonalds, they are much better at their job. It is the first time in my life not leaving a tip at a restaurant and you fully...

Nice ambience. Food is good. Comprehensive menu . This restaurant will be a huge success with following improvements: Not every menu has the same page order and some pages were torn or missing. 3 out of 5 visits did not have daily specials available. Food court quality condiment containers and napkins need to be replaced with some that match the restaurant. Servers shouldn't start dimming or switching off lights before closing time when there are still diners.

Follow-up visit: Glad to see business getting better. Food retains good quality. disappointed to find some specials are deleted but understand it's due to cost. wonder why waitresses are different every time. Inconsistent service .....Entree served before soup, drinks served after we paid the bill. neglected to refill condiment containers. Crushed ketchup containers inappropriate for this class of restaurant.(see attached photo) servers still rush to close at 8.30 and starts turning off lights.

Update: Back a few times and glad to see improvements to the previous comments. Food consistently good, Must try pork knuckle (limited availability). Service is good when C and S are working. Enjoy when the 'CS' combination is here, very attentive and welcoming. B is hardworking, but M is not a team player. The volume of the piano is too loud.

Update We used to visit Avery Cafe frequently, at a record of 5 times a week. Experienced the ups and down of the restaurant. We stopped going after we went for a family gathering booking the VIP room which was our big mistake. Orders were messed up and the room was basically a storage room, ridiculously worse than eating at a food court. We hated to see the restaurant going so bad.... Luckily we decided to give it a last chance two days ago (Monday). Glad to see Avery Cafe finally gets back to where it was! The bossy waitress was gone, and the two new ladies were very customer oriented; friendly attitude and sincere. Food is good. The only thing is the volume of the piano is too high. If you were treated badly with lousy service over the last few months, you might consider...