Xoong — Restaurant in Albert-Eden

Disappointing experience tonight (15/2/20) - I think you only find out how good a restaurant really is by how they deal with a bad situation. I have never written a review before but I don’t recall walking out of a restaurant feeling so angry and mistreated either. when we ordered we specifically asked that we can’t have any chilli powder in any of the dishes as I am allergic. The waitress assured us she knew the dishes well and will advise us accordingly. Turned out not to be the case. For the small dishes they did separate the chilli powder. But 2 out of the 3 main dishes were hot (the wagyu beef and the lemongrass chicken). we told them the beef dish was hot and clearly you can see chilli. It took two waitress to re make the beef dish. When we received the dish the second time, we still saw the chilli. This time a male waiter told us to try it, because he ‘believes’ it’s not hot. We tried it and it was still very hot. There were 4 chilli in the dish. We had young children so we clearly couldn’t wait for the dish to come the third time. when we went to pay, they initially over charged us for a glass of wine and an extra beer. We checked with the lady, she clearly didn’t believe us and had to check with the waitress. Perhaps it’s because we complained about the beef again at paying time. She said she did communicate to the kitchen but it was outside her control. Really? How big is the kitchen? When she reprinted the bill the second time there was still had an extra beer charged. Lucky we double checked again. In hindsight they shouldn’t have charged for the spicy beef which they clearly made it wrong twice. Moreover, the third bowl of rice we ordered was dry and hard. Absolutely awful - but I felt bad about complaining again. The check out lady - although she said she is sorry but not once we felt she genuinely wanted to make it a better experience for us. She just wanted us to keep our mouth shut and go away. I hope no one will experience this again but clearly this will be...

Booked dinner at 7.15pm for the family (5 people). Got there early and ordered drinks and 4 small plates for starters. Waited for 20 plus minutes before reminding the front of house crew that we were waiting for drinks. Continued to wait while other patrons that arrived after us were served. Reminded the service crew again and got 1 dish. At 8.15pm (an hour after arriving), we asked if the food would be coming. The response was that they were extremely busy! Teenagers were hungry, I suggested that if it was going to take longer, we were happy to go elsewhere. Manager agreed and charged us for the drinks, no effort made to retain customers. We went across the road to another restaurant, that was considerably busier. Managed to find a table (lucky) and got dinner in 20 minutes! I don't understand why Xoong requires patrons to book and then isn't able to gauge how busy the night will be? Defeats the purpose of booking. Can't really say much about the food as we only got the Yakitori chicken, which wasn't bad but not great. Front of house staff need to learn basic customer service skills and at least offer to top up water while patrons wait. Would I go there again? Probably not, there are too many other great options on this street to...

Some great flavours. We ate here on Sunday. There were 2 adults and 1 child. We had the Sashimi, The catch of the day tartare and the fish special of the day which was deep fried snapper with a sweet and sour sauce. Firstly I want to say the Kingfish Sashimi was OUTSTANDING. One of the best I've ever had. Unique to anything like it, it had a bed of apple and a spicy sauce and was just sensational. The catch of the day tartare was also very pleasant, though not quite as good as the sashimi. The Fish of the day was deep fried snapper and was $42. The snapper was tasty, but tiny. Barely legal I would have thought, not a lot of flesh and obviously lots of bones. Didn't present good value, though it was very very nice. Recently we had a similar dish elsewhere, where the fish was cut up for you into cubes, which made for a great eating experience. I think I would have preferred this, however on such a small fish hard to do I imagine. We finished with a riceball dessert which was pleasant but lacked the knockout punch of some of the other dishes. Overall happy with our meal, would return, but would probably skip the fish given the price of it...