Restaurant Hotspot Central — Restaurant in Leiden

Atmosphere : Outside looked really simple for us and we thought it is just a normal asian snackbar/ fusion but inside the atmosphere was lovely and cozy ! We went with two and since it was not busy, they had us in a nice big window view table. Menu + Food : First the menu is so diverse and I have to appreciate the effort you put in description and story of every dishes. I am vietnamese and I love the small details that you wrote the name and dish story correctly. Because the menu was so diverse, I was not sure about how it tastes at first but omg, this is one of the place of asian food I have eaten in the NL that I actually like. Both dishes we tried, noodle beef soup and hotspot stir noodle came out nicely seasoned ( most of the time it is a bit bland in the NL). I would like it a bit more spicy but I think you could ask them as well. Beef was soft, nice texture with a bit of fat, broth was savoury and not sweet of sugar like some place I have tried, and noodle cooked just nicely done. I also tried my bf stir noodle and the beef was delicious as well, it tasted almost like the Chinese restaurant I used to eat a lot at home. I also had mango boba which was more mango tea and mango popping, as I had tried a lot of nice boba place it was not my too favourite as normally i like a bit of mango chunk but okay. I appreciate it was not too sweet :-D I think the price is very decent for the amount of food we got, I was still full in the evening to work thanks to the amount of beef in the noodle. Service : The moment we walked in a lady help us to sanitize our hand and hang our coat. The guy who served us was also nice and patient since we took quite some time to decide. I have nothing to complain in my visit here and would like to try more dishes here. Bonus : it was a nice experience, the only thing that made me feel conflicted at first was when I read the review and the rebuttal of the restaurant 😅 I used to write reviews on another platform and now would like to start again, honestly writing what I like or not. I see the owner put a lot of dedication to the restaurant and actually research the dishes well. Still in my humble opinion, it is normal for restaurant to have good and bad review and unless it is fake and made up, maybe it is better to take some more lightly. As the spirit of food review should be your own honest opinion, what you like or not, as there are always some good and bad day of restaurent. I think if you do it well like this customer would still love to come nevertheless of some bad review. I will come back to try more...

Avoid this restaurant! The quality of service is a joke at every level and particularly, one waitress was unexpectedly unfriendly and rude. However, I’m glad that I have addressed this issue to her face, and I genuinely hope she has a wonderful career.

I’m going to be explicit about the incident that happened on Wednesday 2023/7/4. We were a group of Chinese students. This young lady took our order but gave us the wrong dish. It’s not a big deal, really, especially during the evening time, anyone in her position would have made the same mistake. To our surprise, she gave us an inpatient look and asked us to think again about what we had ordered. She said, “你自己想想你点了什么” (“YOU think about what you ordered!”).

After the payment, we reminded her about her attitude and expressed that we felt uncomfortable with her words. Almost immediately, she got agitated, and extremely defensive and delivered the most insincere apology that I have ever heard in my entire life. Then she pretended that she couldn’t understand Mandarin, and insisted on speaking English, given the fact that a minute ago she spoke perfectly Chinese! (According to the public LinkedIn page for this waitress, her native language is mandarin and she was a mandarin teacher for 6 years. This is open access information that she posted herself. It’s outrageous for her to make this lie directly to our faces. Unbelievable. I don’t mention her name just in case it becomes personal. I’m sure she’s a wonderful person but just bad at her job.

Therefore, we asked for the manager. The male manager came and told us “Stop making a scene!”. Then the female owner of the restaurant approached us, demanding “Why can’t we just meet in the middle? Why can’t we just accept her apology?” I’m not a difficult person but I didn’t like the way she delivered her messages. It was way too aggressive. I refused her apology and she just keep giving me “life lessons”. What I found funny is the fact that she’s literally trying to force me to accept their apologies while accusing me of having a communication issue. Just marvellous! She thought it was a great gesture for her to approach us and gave us a speech. I mean, she’s not the queen of Scotland and I have the freedom to simply refuse her apology!

Anyway, life is too short to spend any second on this restaurant :) btw, we have rights for our images, and we have rights to write complaints at this platform....

SERVICE: That's a disater, I still couldn't image what happened today. I recommended this restaurant to my friends coming from other countries and we had dinner together. But that's a mistake. So what happened to us are from three different persons. 1.From the waitress, a girl seems to be the daughter of proprietor are very rude to us. When they were delivering our courses, there is one dish that we didn't order, so I just questioned that. But she answered "You definitely ordered that, I have records". But after she checked and it turned out that's her fault. She just put this on machine problems without sorry to us.What's worse is after the dinner, one of my friend said to the waitress that we're not satisfied with her service, then she said 你解释一下(which is the original words from her mouse, word by word). In chinese, we would only say that when you made big trouble, it's like a informal trial. From proprietors(a couple), till this moment, we were a little bit irritated by this girl, so we said we want to see the manager. Then the male proprietor came here. And my friend asked if he could speak chinese, but he refused although he could😐. And his attitude is also like we're the guy who did something wrong. Even though he did ask the girl to apologize to us, and she also did that. But when she said sorry, they still made us feel we made a mistake. Then the girl just left. And also something else happened. But I'm too tired to record everything.

I just give you a honest warning, be careful with this restaurant, although the food is fine, but if you encounter with that girl, she would ruin a...