Old Chengdu Restaurante Cinese Sichuan — Restaurant in Rome

Extremely salty dishes, don’t be fooled by the photos, the high rating and the over 1000 reviews which we fell for as a tourist. Run if you can.

We arrived at a quarter past 6. We were refused to go inside as they just mopped the floor, the female waitress asked us to sit outside, we were totally ok about it.

We sat down and ordered food, the waitress seemed very grumpy but we weren’t expected good services as we did know all the bad reviews on little red book regarding bad service and bad food - Chinese version TikTok and not a single good review there as of today. We were naive to believe the food might be good due to the photos on google reviews. So no issue so far.

After waiting for 10 to 15 minutes which was when I expected the dishes might be coming and naturally I wanted to take my primary school kid to wash hands before eating.

Yet understand the floor might not dried up, so we decided to wait until dishes came. There were a couple who came later than us have decided to move from outside to sit inside and have been sitting inside for a while. So when it’s time, I walked inside with my kid and asked for direction to toilet.

The waitress again refused us to use the toilet and asked us not to wash hands, to be fair she did give us alcohol. I explained we would like to wash hands if that’s ok and she pointed the staff sink on the wine section. Again, we were totally ok about it, but there was not hand wash, so we turned to her for help which she clearly was upset that we needed to use hand soap. I questioned this and the male staff in the end went to grab us a few drops of hand soap which me and my daughter managed to wash our hands with it. A bit unpleasant and shocking about the waitress’s rudeness but you can’t expect everyone to be a friendly or kind person.

Our main dishes came but the rice never came and 3 more staffs checked on different occasions and all realized later there was an issue with the rice. After 30 minutes wait and they figured at the time the rice won’t be able to serve in any time soon. They asked us to change the steam rice to egg fried rice and offered to charge us the same price.

Understand we won’t be able to get our rice and our dishes all turned cold, we said yes and hope for the best. One of the egg fried rice were extremely salty and oily combined with the already extremely salty dishes. I had to send back the rice and asked them to try for themselves.

The male staff came back later apologizing with newly made egg fried rice which was a lot less salty.

To be fair, all other staffs were quite reasonable to deal with and quite friendly and made an effort to make it better which we appreciate it.

The food itself, the stir fried water spinach with minced garlic is a bit salty but properly cooked with reasonable portion, I live in london so all my comparison is london standard.

The pork with chili was extremely salty and you can’t really taste anything else which make the small portion bearable.

The beef on sizzling plate again was extremely salty. The combination of extremely salty meat and oily soggy rice made our experience an unforgettable horrible first meal in Roma.

Base on my experience I would not be able to recommend this restaurant mainly due to bad service of the female and the quality and taste of the food combined with pitiful portion of meat dishes.

FYI, bill...

I highly doubt how this business is still surviving and in fact I also doubt the accuracy of these high ratings to begin with. There is only one way you can even come close to getting a table here. You either need to be from this country or you should speak their language. Everyone else will be looked down upon. I am from the US. I have been to several restaurants where language is a barrier but never came across a restaurant that does the below:

Unpleasant host/owner. Get prepared to be ignored. If you go on a weekend asking for a table, she will basically say one hour wait time and will never give you a table. She will act as if she is overwhelmed when there are only half the tables are occupied. I very politely tell this to the host/owner that she is not god’s gift to this planet and she will have to tone her attitude skills down a bit. Getting well dressed should also convert into what we call as etiquette and by all standards she has zero etiquette

In the food service industry, especially in a post pandemic situation, SANITATION has become the most important and hot topic. I have never ever seen a scenario either in US or elsewhere where you are given a table to sit on where the dishes are not cleared, the table not wiped and sanitised and the busboy straight out rejecting to clear the table and then he happily was clearing the other tables that had patrons from his region. No kidding we were standing near the table where the dishes were not cleared almost for 30 minutes.

Inspite of all of this, we were absolutely polite and given the reviews, we thought we will give a dish a try and then we ordered a pint of beer. The food runner gets the dish and clearly she herself was embarrassed because there was no spot for her to keep the dish. She literally kept that warm dish on the hostess corner and left. And the food obviously went dry and cold. At this point, after a one hour wait, after being disrespected and watching the hostess being rude time and again, we thought to leave the place. I decided to pay and the hostess had the nerve and audacity to say that we were being inpatient with our food lying on her counter because of lack of space created on our table due to dishes lying on the table, food scattered all over the place from the previous party. I literally laughed at her, took my change and left.

Couple of things. The health authorities should pay attention to this restaurant because they are following unsafe practises regarding sanitation. Just imagine if they are being so haphazard in front of us, I only imagine what’s going on in the kitchen. The hostess is not a hostess actually. She is clearly overwhelmed. Get her some training on how to receive customers and be nice to them. Language is always a barrier. You can still be pleasant in my opinion. Also the owner of the restaurant should take note that all people who visit his restaurant should be treated equally and there should be no favouritism. In our country, the treatment meted out at as is also called ‘Racism’

Service is an over thumping 0 stars.

I also have a feeling that they have a bot in place that is throwing 30 good reviews for one bad review. Just kidding but who...

We are visiting Rome all the way from New Zealand and this restaurant has been all the rave so we decided to try it. The food was incredibly delicious, maybe the best chinese food I have had, even in New Zealand. Thank you so much to the chef who has made this incredible food! Unfortunately the service was not great. After 25 minutes of waiting to order we were starving so I went to the counter to order. The girl at the counter reassured me someone would come to the table and to please take a seat. We waited another 15 minutes and no one came to take our order so once again we went to the counter. Unfortunately the girl (not chinese, english speaking woman) reprimanded me for coming to the counter again and told me to sit down as the staff were having lunch. I understand everyone needs to have lunch but it is not okay and not normal to make someone wait for almost 40 minutes just to place an order, especially on such a hot day (39 degrees when we were there). Another frustrating thing was that we are obviously foreigners and we could see chinese people who arrived after us were being served before us. I think that is incredibly rude, we were polite and respectful and we expect the same back. Unfortunately i think the lack of service was due to the owners not being present, as the owners seem like lovely people. If i was a local i likely would not come back due to the service, however, The food again was extraordinary and im lucky to have tasted this food. Please fix the service to ensure you have returning...