FORE Restaurant — Restaurant in Taichung

Visited for my wife's birthday on a friend's recommendation. I will start with the good things: Nice atmosphere, good space at the table. The Caesar salad and the mushroom soup were excellent as was the prime short rib which my wife ordered. But.

There was a large and very noisy party group upstairs with children sprinting around the restaurant playing hide and seek, not small kids either. While we were there, apart from the large table there were four other tables upstairs, being served by between 2 and three staff in total. So that is about 14 people at the big table plus 16 at the other tables for a grand total of 30 people being served by 3 staff. That was a shock in a restaurant in Taiwan in this price bracket, what is the management thinking? I was constantly waiting to try to get service, this is the managements fault, not the staff's. It was very annoying indeed.

I ordered the 30 ounce rib eye to share. It was OK, but only correctly cooked at the ends, the center was rare, rather than the medium rare I ordered. It was Blue in places as well. (Research indicates that steaks are sometimes intentionally under-cooked to allow for it to be corrected later) It was tender and juicy, but did not seem to have been seasoned much as it had little flavor unless I dunked it in the salt they provided. Had better.

My wife's steak arrived 20 minutes after mine. What should I do? Wait for hers to arrive and mine be cold? Or just go ahead and finish mine even though it was her birthday. I did chase her steak after having been eating mine for 15 minutes and was told the short rib takes much longer to cook (No idea of the veracity of that information, but it would have been nice to be told first.) and the steak arrived about 5 minutes after that. I had to leave the table and go to the service area myself in order to get someone to help chase the steak as no staff were available or visible. Really?

Anyway, we finished our steak and then after a long wait managed to get the menu to choose a dessert. And after another long wait where we had almost decided to get the bill and forget dessert, we managed to get the waitress to explain what "Apple, Dill" means. (The Chinese did not explain it either). Apparently it was actually a mille feuille apple pie. Still not sure what the Dill was, but there you go. Anyway, it did not matter because they did not have any. Super. It was only 7.30 on a Saturday and they had already run out of desserts? Nice. Helpfully, the waitress told us that we could have one if we wanted to wait another 30 minutes for it.

I asked for the bill, and the waitress did give us a free dessert for my wife's birthday in the end, so full marks to the waitress for effort. Thank you.

In summary, I wanted to like it, but the severe and ludicrous lack of staff ruined it for me. Having to go to the clearing area to find staff in a place where I am paying over 2,000 NT per person is not at all acceptable. Not the staff's fault at all, they are obviously dong the best they can in the situation. We filled out the card at the end and told them the issues and left our phone number too, but did not receive any calls. Hence the review. I did not refuse to pay the 10% service charge, but only because I felt sorry for the staff and did not want to make a scene on my wife's birthday. We wandered out of the restaurant pretty much ignored, although I did hear a "goodbye" when we were halfway down the stairs.

I have been to better places in Taiwan at this price point, not impressed, sorry. Hire more staff, maybe get a manager to oversee what...

Most of the food we ordered are tasty and looking great. Bread was ok, but the butter is very good. Pork collar and the warm salad is delicious. We was disappointed with the Rib eye, we came here for the steak, but the steak was quite normal. Overall is a bit over priced. The most disappointed part was the service. We ordered truffle fries, but they gave us normal fries. And didn't notice until we asked twice about why we got the normal fries? And I ordered sparking water, but the lady pouring normal drinking water in my sparking water glass. By the way, they didn't say sorry.... It's the first time I paid almost $2000/per person for this kind of...

(1) This was not like a typical steak set meal. The multitude of irrelevant side dishes could distract you from truly tasting the flavor of the steak. Didn't get the idea that the chefs were trying to convey. The set is just weird and make me feel that this is not a stakehouse.

(2) The steak was just fine. It didn't exceed our expectations.

(3) We could definitely find another restaurant near this steakhouse that offers a far better quality steak experience.

(4) The service didn't meet our expectations for a high-end restaurant.

(5) The environment was too noisy with echo, and the ambiance wasn't relaxed enough to justify the high...