RESTAURANTE ASIÁTICO SHENG — Restaurant in Almuñécar

UPDATE, Reply to the Restaurant's response: (See Original Review BELOW)

1. We often order food without soya sauce and glutamat in other Asian restaurants, and the chefs always made dishes which are tasty.
2. If your chef cannot make dish according to client's wishes, you need to communicate that to your client as soon as possible. You could have politely told us that modification of your dishes from the menu are not possible, we would have said "thank you" and went to another place to eat. OR best would be if you replace your chef :)
3. Sorry for using word "suspicious" when I talked about tofu. Maybe the word "strange" was better :) I was not referring to its flavour, which I understand depends on the sauce, but to the consistence of it.
4. It is great that you are always fast to respond to the feedback of your customers, but reading your reply for me, and for other unhappy customers, it feels that you take feedback very aggressively, even blaming your customers, instead of taking responsibility for improving your service and inviting your customers to discuss how your service can be improved.
5. In your response you were fast to blame me about the food taste, but you did not explain at all why your service is so bad in delivering food in timely matter, as well explaining why your staff is having conflicts in front of your customers. Such staff must be fired next day.

Taste of your food is very little part of the overall customer experience. I would have not said "never again" if A) I would have gotten the food within 15-25 minutes (average time I expect to wait for take away). it was the only thing you apologized for. But it does not seem you are going to improve on this, because I was reading other 1-star reviews, where other clients were complaining about the same 6-12 months ago. They were the same time to get their food: from 1h to 1h 40min. Maybe it is time for you to expand your Kitchen and number of chefs, OR to remove 50% of the tables in the restaurant :) B) if the staff would have paid attention to me from the beginning and made me feel welcoming in the restaurant. (Everyone seems so busy that they forgot about us at the beginning. Nobody was interested to hear our wishes.) C) the chef would have come to me and give a friendly warning that without soya sauce and glutamat he cannot make a tasty food. Said sorry for waiting and offered some other options. D) I would not see the staff conflicting internally. Which creates bad energy inside the restaurant, as well as for the food itself.

If not the A+B+C+D, I would have considered coming back to your restaurant and giving you a 2nd chance to improve on the food. But because of all the combination of unlucky circumstances and your response where you only took responsibility for the waiting time, but aggressively blamed me for everything else, the only thing I can say is NEVER AGAIN NEVER AGAIN :)

ORIGINAL REVIEW: Never again. It was Sunday. We ordered 2 vegetarian dishes to take away. I don't even want to mention that they were not very interested in taking order from us. Also, upon the order they did not warn us about the waiting times. We ended up waiting 1 hour for our 2 take away dishes! In between, we could observe the conflict in the kitchen, some Chinese chef shouting on the Spanish staff. This definitely does not add a positive energy neither to the restaurant, nor to the food itself.

When we came home, we were disgusted about the food. It was super oily, suspicious quality tofu. No taste. Again, super oily. We did try to eat it as we were really hungry, but unfortunately after not even 50% of the food we decided to through it into the trash bin.

Overall, we got impression they are very busy, possibly don't have enough staff, and the ones who work there are unhappy, cause they have internal conflicts, and they don't care about their customers who are looking to be attended and who want to order some...

Pre covid times, this restaurant was one of our regular haunts and we would often have their menu del dia as there was a good choice at a good price. However, we went for lunch this week to find they've stopped the menu del dia, which is fine so we chose off the menu. We both had chicken and sweetcorn soup which was dreadful, with far too much salt. It would be fair to say, it was the worst soup we've ever had in any Chinese restaurant, totally tasteless. The main, beef and mushrooms were far too salty so we called the waiter out and sent it back as it tasted awful. They brought out a new one but the fried rice had gone cold so that was sent back to be microwaved. We skipped dessert. All in all a disappointing lunch and we were both hungry before we went in so that made it worse somehow. So the restaurant that had a winner with the menu del dia and food was always first rate has gone down in our opinion and we wondered if different chefs are working there. To be fair, service was fine, but there were only about 4 tables occupied at the time we arrived. Would have to seriously rethink...

Too many waiters spoil the broth?! A terrible experience. Almost the same number of waiters as customers. But in spite of that, super-slow/ disinterested service. A complete lack of coordination within the (relatively) vast staff team. Drinks ordered; forgotten; ordered again; appeared to be forgotten again- but came eventually after the food was served. Plates served at different times. eg. rice first; accompanying meat dish almost 10 minutes later (when rice already cold). Wrong meal served for one of the main courses (which was horrible, looked like leftovers from different dishes re-hashed together). Waiter was politely told it was the wrong dish & not really edible. No apology/ offer to substitute. Charged in full in any event, despite the complaint; just paid up to get out of there and end the experience, rather than argue the toss. Really just quite astounding that a restaurant clearly lacking effective organisation and offering such a dissatisfying dining experience remains in business at all- when they are facing so much competition...