Big Way Hot Pot (West End) — Restaurant in Vancouver

Great location. Similar size to the other Big Way downtown but this one feels less cramp. Ingredients felt very fresh. I love the kelp and also taro filled fishball.

The servers who interacted with me at this location were very polite and kind. Similar to the other Bigway location downtown.

Fresh crushed thai chili at the sauce counter is some serious heat.

Happy hour: Free iced milk green tea (moderate sweetness, kinda like boba tea with no boba and slightly thicker than milk tea made at home) was a nice bonus while waiting for the hotpot stuff to cook.

Hot pot was cooked pretty fast, i think i got mine in 5-10 mins.

Generally Bigway locations are moderately noisy (chatter bounces off the walls), suits individual eaters and friend groups, but not many people on “date night”, though you can prob hear each other fine but other people’s conversations will sound louder than yours because of the sound design. Since it’s already noisy, it can be seen as kid-friendly, especially because they can pick exactly the amount they want to eat, but no baby highchairs seen, so more suited to kids above toddler age.

Free softserve icecream is a nice bonus.

All-in-all, a moderate sized meal for one adult costs about $25 pre-tipping, could be more with more weight, but unlikely to be less than $20 unless you pick alot of dried noodles.

There are takeaway boxes incase you don’t finish the whole meal (the broth itself can be quite filling if u pick the collagen broth).

Allergy info: No gluten free labels on the soup menu or ingredients for the hotpot, so you would need to ask or be relatively familiar with asian food (fishballs will likely have small amounts of wheat starch for example).

But some items like raw vegetables, rice noodles, raw meat slices will be easy to recognise.

Vegans have some unique choices including two vegan soup choices and rare things like (the texture is very similar to tripe and im pretty sure its made of konjac… Not sure if any vegans are dying to eat something tripe like but if u do, here it is).

Vegetable choices were several asian veges (choi sum, mung bean spouts and crown daisy - which has a kind of bitter and maybe weird taste for non-asians or asians that dont like this, potentially. Similar to how some people dont like cilantro).

Several unorthodox noodle and ricecake based options (my fav was some kind of noodle made from ricecake, like a ricecake stick but hollow) which would likely be suitable for gluten allergy but...

I had a terrible experience here, I came to dine at 1:15am. The attitude the staff gave off was horrible. If you can’t provide the best customer service before closing, you shouldn’t be accepting customers or working the closing shift. While waiting for my food, I asked whether the sauce bar was available. The staff said everything is packed up and to let them know what sauces I want so that the kitchen can prepare everything for us. I told them to bring me a bit of everything. They gave me a weird look as if I was being annoying. They stalled and took 10 minutes to figure out this situation and by the time my food arrived, I still didn’t receive my sauces. When it came to me choosing my sauces, the kitchen purposely didn’t take out every sauce for me due to their laziness and that everything was wrapped up in the fridge. It took much longer to collect all my sauces due to their laziness and me having to ask them to take out the missing sauces that were in the fridge despite mentioning 3 times that I wanted all sauces. The guy that worked in the kitchen was so lazy he didn’t bring out the soy sauce, chili oil and garlic and I had to ask him 3 times for 3 different things. My dry mix noodle order came cold, I could sense they didn’t cook the food as long as they normally would since they were rushing to close, other big way locations, your food comes piping hot. Some of my ingredients such as the corn were still very raw. My other order which was a noodle soup, ended up being cold and my noodles went from al-dente to soft/mushy after I had gotten all my sauces because this process took 10 minutes. I’ve never had such a bad experience at big way and thought this location would be amazing as it had the highest rating amongst other big ways. I left super disappointed and unsatisfied by both the food and staff. Having been to multiple big ways locations, this location lacks in...

I have visited this location many times as a regular customer but after today I’ve decided not to come back because I was extremely disappointed with how the supervisor handled the situation.

I brought a voucher that I received after finding a bug in my soup on a previous visit. It was given to me with an apology, but the supervisor told me today that it had expired and was worth nothing since I hadn’t used it. My immediate thought was how can an apology voucher even have an expiry date? The supervisor who gave it to me never mentioned any expiry date at all. It honestly made me feel like the voucher was just a fake gesture to brush off the situation.

What made it worse was that the supervisor kept insisting there was nothing they could do, trying to smooth things over only with an apology. I had expected at least a partial discount, but instead I ended up paying for the full meal just to get my soup. They offered me a free drink, but that felt meaningless since I already had one from the happy hour promotion.

They gave us the voucher in the first place to apologize. We had the impression that they could have done better, especially given that this was a follow-up to a previous issue that had already impacted our experience. On top of that, some ingredients were mislabeled, and I got the wrong items in my soup. Overall, the whole experience was frustrating and deeply disappointing.

Even though I found bugs in my soup several times, I kept coming back because I liked the service, the friendly staff, and the taste. But now the food doesn’t taste the same, and the way I was treated makes me feel there’s no reason to go back anymore.

I sent you an email even before posting my review, but I got no reply. Why are you asking me to email again if you...