Asian Kingdom - St. Julian's — Restaurant in Saint Julian's

Overall… Food is overpriced for what you receive. Quality of food is poor. Quantity of food is minimal. Customer Service was superficial.

I ordered special fried rice. No pork, chicken to replace it. And additional beef which I was charged €2 for. I also ordered the starter platter, a rose wine and still water.

When the rice came out, firstly the portion was so small. I could barely see any chicken. Or beef, or shrimps for that matter! They cut everything up super small to give you less and save money! I counted 4 tiny pieces of chicken with the waiter, who insisted I was wrong (and blind presumably) Eventually, he (reluctantly) brought my plate back to the kitchen and it was returned to me later.

It appeared to have a few more tiny pieces of beef. The rice (or something in it was super crunchy which made it difficult to chew while eating) the extra chicken to replace the pork was not evident. At that point, I could not be bothered to send back again as I was hungry and just wanted to eat.

The starter… Wow. Where should I start. The 1 satay didn’t taste how it should. No peanut sauce and it was deep-fried and dry. There was 1 tiny chicken wing. The 2 dumplings and 1 spring roll were just ok. Mediocre. Nothing special at all. As for the 4 prawn crackers - they were super stale and tasteless. I think you could buy better crackers in local supermarket. I told a female waitress and she just looked at me as though I was an alien, gave me a fake smile and walked away. I informed a male waiter. He initially alleged it tasted stale because I had previously been outside smoking a cigarette for 5mins! The cheek of it/him. The crackers tasted like they had been out for 5days, never mind 5mins.

The rose wine was clearly a cheap type which the Asian Kingdom charges customers too much for.

I was so dissatisfied with everything in general so I cancelled the water as just wanted to finish my meal as I was hungry and get out of there.

The atmosphere/energy from the staff was off. Superficial. No one went the extra yard to please me, the evidently dissatisfied customer. Far too often the male waiter appeared to be annoyed and impatient with me for making valid comments and asking questions. Made me feel uncomfortable and awkward. Poor hospitality in general.

I had high hopes for this place but left the restaurant still HUNGRY, underwhelmed and upset that I wasted €23 of my money which would’ve been best spent, elsewhere!

Later that evening, I was telling a local Maltese person about my diabolical experience at Asian Kingdom. He informed me they have had many branches close down. I am not surprised in the slightest.

I do not recommend this place. Dine at Asian Kingdom at your peril.

Take further note - even the restaurant owners responses to negative feedback left by customers is very telling in itself; defensive, rude and full of excuses.

The owner and his staff clearly do not like you as a person should you give them negative, yet importantly, CONSTRUCTIVE feedback. The energy they put in to lying, being defensive and rude is energy they should put in to actually IMPROVING their food & service delivery!

The positive comments/reviews here are either fake and/or customers standards are incredibly low lol

Shameful...

Originally we tried for a meal at Kuya (2 mins away) at about 8:30pm last Saturday, but they didn’t have any spare tables until 10pm. We decided to go to Asian Kingdom instead, as we fancied some Far East style food for our last night in Malta.

After taking a while to come to the table, the waitress was quite pushy (and in my opinion rude) for us to decide instantly whether we wanted the all you can eat menu or a la carte menu - without letting us take time to look at the menus to see if the all you can eat was more beneficial. Not the biggest problem in the world, as we were hungry and thought we’d just make sure we get our money’s worthy from the all you can eat. The all you can eat is a bit unusual, in that you have to select everything you want (starters’ mains, desserts etc) when you first order. You only have one more chance to reorder, and you get charged a la carte prices on top of the all you can eat prices for any dishes you don’t eat to discourage waste. Not wanting to get charged extra without knowing portion sizes, we decided to order fairly conservatively - as we thought we’d have a better grasp what we could finish off on the second and final order.

The starters came out after quite a long amount of time, two plates - one of which the food was stone cold. From finishing the starter to being served the main, we had to wait over 50 minutes. Two tables near us received 3x courses each in that same time period. I raised this with the front desk, so the manager got involved. The manager said the reason the other tables had received 3 courses in this time period was because ‘they were regulars’ - which I don’t quite get how this means they should get THREE full courses while we’re waiting and have have ordered before them. At this point we were also missing a drink I’d ordered a long time before. To the manager’s credit she personally went and fetched the drink quite quickly after this (not sure why it took so long, they basically give you cans of beer which you have to pour yourself).

After finishing our mains, a fair amount of time elapsed, so I went and asked one of the waitresses for the menu so we could order the second round of the all you can eat. After waiting another 25+ minutes, the menu still hadn’t come so we decided to leave and only pay for what we had eaten. For context, the all you can eat would have been €52 for 2 people. We were there for 2 and a half hours and only received €37 worth of food - despite being very hungry and willing to eat lots! The plan was also to have a quite a few drinks for our last night, but this also wasn’t possible due to the extremely slow service. The manager knocked €12 off of our food to compensate, but the experience still ruined our plans for the evening.

Ironically it would probably have been quicker waiting the 90 minutes for a table at Kuya! We ended up having to go to McDonalds before going back to the hotel to get some quick food so that we were full before going to bed. Amusingly we seen several other diners from the restaurant in there, which makes me think we weren’t the only ones who received poor service. I would advise people to give this...

We chose this restaurant for our last holiday meal. We had three children with us and four adults.

Firstly, we were tabled on the roof terrace and the staff that seated us seemed overwhelmed and disinterested.

There is a process in place when ordering the all you can eat, that seems to favour the restaurant and not the paying customer. We placed our order and were told, for an all you can eat buffet there are rules. 1. You can only complete two rounds of orders on a paper 2. Certain dishes can only be ordered twice 3. Small children would have to be charged £16 if they ate anything from the buffet.

This felt very militant and stressful and the staff seemed unhappy. The kids meal took a while to come out, so one ate a dumpling. Everything went downhill from there. Food ordered, turned up in a peculiar and suspicious sequence, with large gaps of time between. It was almost like we were in a process to get as full as possible. I appreciate the not wasting rule and we tried to keep to this. However, we ended up completing one order (out of the two allowed) and it being 3 hours of us being at the restaurant with small, tired children. We intervened in the process and tried to complete all orders, however this resulted in rudeness from staff and random and particular dishes coming out of the kitchen again. The more expensive dishes from our first order, had still not arrived.

We ended up talking with a manager who accused us of being the issue. They had spoken to their staff and did not attempt to understand our experience. The table next to us, also had a poor experience and we were accused of colluding with them.

In an attempt to get our children to bed, we asked to take the food away. We were met with such indifference, there was not point in discussing the matter. We were offered ice cream and shots, but had to pay full price, which is eye watering based on the experience.

We paid £180 for an extremely stressful experience and last meal on our holiday.

I suggest the owner contact me to put this right, as 11:30pm at night, we were in no position to negotiate and just wanted to get out of...