Bao Bei — Restaurant in Vancouver

Had dinner with a friend yesterday. Ambient is great. Service is courteous. However, the food was a HUGE disappointment. I understand the the style of the food is Chinese with a French twist. I have to admit I am probably not their target market. Here are the food items we ordered and I did not LOVE any of them:

Crispy Tofu: 2/5 - Sweet soy sauce was overpowering. That's all you taste, the sweetness. Water chestnut failed to balance off the sickening sweet after taste. I enjoyed sweet soy sauce, but it can add a bit of savoury in that mix.

Steam dumpling with prawn and scallop: 4/5 - decent, but wasn't unique. Chef does delivered on the taste, but the skin was over-steamed so it was a bit hard on the closing.

Mantou Bun: 0/5: HATE IT with passion. The bun was greasy (not sure if they spread anything like lard to keep it moist?) The cabbage was tasteless and made the bun soggy with its moisture, and the shredded pork was tasteless. The only thing I tasted was the chili. I couldn't taste the garlic, or scallion. The textual of the shredded pork was less than desirable. I was even angrier knowing the owner was Taiwanese ( I am Taiwanese too). I love Taiwanese bun with pork (traditionally with pickled cabbage and peanut powder to add a bit of sweetness).

Pork Saddle: 3/5: I like the fried pork. It was quality lean meat, well executed. However, the meat was ruined by the dressing. Soaking the pork and vegetables in vinaigrette guarantees that you only taste the sourness. Perhaps it was by design but the cilantro was hard to be detected. I also like the fried potatoes and the like the pickled cucumber. When you eat everything together, it's edible before everything got overwhelmed by the dressing.

We didn't complain about the food, since there's nothing the server can do. We spent about $75 for the meal, which is alright. For the quality of the food, I don't...

It boggles my mind how this place is still in business and has a waitlist to get in. I assumed because of the long line up that it would be good, and that is true 95% of the time. This was the other 5%.

The hostess and bartender was nice and ok. Other than that everything was below average and very disappointing.

For a city that has one of the best Chinese food in the world, this is the bottom of the pile in Vancouver. $12 for five dumplings that were poor in taste. I guarantee that T&T packaged dumplings is 10x better than this to say the least. Fried rice took 50+ minutes before it was to arrive after ordering. Basically all the food was cold much before the fried rice came. All they can say was it takes a bit longer than the other dishes. No customer service to enhance our experience or apologies. They didn't even ask how our food was midway through.

This place is very overly priced, food court Chinese food is so much better. Not even in comparison to the delicious chinese restaurants all over the city.

I am Asian and eat every type of Asian food and know the usual Vancouverite food standards.

The only way I can even conceive on how this place is still running is all the nonAsians that come here thinking it's good but only because they've never tried any actual Chinese restaurants in Vancouver. The nonAsians dont know they r being ripped off and that the taste is either bland or mediocre at best. Very disappointing. I do not recommend any of my friends or family to come here as it is just a trick to use alot of money on what is made up to look like Chinese food.

I rarely write reviews but this one I had to in order to warn anybody from wasting their money, let alone the time people have to wait before getting a seat only to find out the waste of...

Soooo disappointed in this place! It had been on my list for a while and my husband and I came for our anniversary to try their chefs tasting menu! We arrived a few minutes before our reservation but weren’t seated until 25 minutes after our reservation time. The host was apologetic and kind because they overbooked our reservation but our server was quite abrupt and rude with us. He didn’t ask us about drinks we had to ask if we can order some drinks first because we hadn’t looked at the menu yet. He seemed annoyed that we ordered the chefs tasting and not a la carte and to be fair I was pretty disappointed with the selection we received. Very much all bland filler foods that needed seasoning. One dish they brought us was a large fried rice with a grid long curly blonde hair deep mixed in to the bowl(neither of us are blonde) easy to say it was pretty gross and were put off our meal. They made us a new rice but After that I did not really feel like eating or want to order anything more. Our server apologized but kind of shook it off as though it’s a normal thing which seems like a bit of a red flag. They brought us the last course a tiny scoop of vanilla ice cream however just kind of avoided us and then didn’t do anything to comp or mend the experience. I understand things happen and it could have been an off night but how you make the experience better shows how you view your customers and this lack of care spoke volumes. It was our anniversary and we just wanted to have a special night together but Bao Bei was not the place to do that. I would not return...