老乾杯 桃園中茂店 — Restaurant in Taoyuan City

Fairly pricey restaurant with some great dishes. The waiters will manage the bbq process for you. We recommend the following dishes:

Grilled Scallops topped with fresh butter and wrapped in dried seaweed Japanese brown wagyu curry Japanese corn rice with soup A5 Wagyu Wagyu slice by kg (sorry, I don't remember the exact name but there is only one of these on the menu) Salmon salad Eggs topped with bottarga and fish roe Wagyu spring rolls

Lacking in the red & white wine by the glass department. That being said, the red wines I've had were good. Nice selection of plum wines for dessert. The sweets for dessert are good but nothing special.

The service is spotty. We've met some really nice and professional waitresses and waiters. But we've also had two negative experiences that simply don't belong to a restaurant in that price class:

We've had the most expensive meat (wagyu charged by the kg). We were notified that there was only an end piece available and decided to try it. Unfortunately the meat was really subpar. We told the waiter who, if I recall correctly, was also the manager on duty. We didn't receive any apology or professional handling of the case. In the end he took away the meat without further comment or asking beforehand if that's okay. We felt it would have been appropriate to grant at least a partial discount. We raised the issue at a later visit and there was no reaction. This caused us to stay away from the place for a long time.

More recently, we've had a waitress who refused to communicate with me (white Westerner). From the start she never looked at me and only talked to my wife. When I started talking to her in Mandarin, she still refused to converse and replied to my wife instead of me. I know that many Taiwanese can be intimidated by foreigners, but in a professional setting, especially at a pricey place that we visit fairly often, we expect better. Waiters need to receive proper training to make sure this does not happen.

I'm on the fence whether to deduct one or two stars from the service category, but decided to take away two because of the perceived severity of the incidents combined with the price range. Should the restaurant feel that after all an apology (or, by now, two) is in order then I would consider only deducting one.

That being said, the service is without much fault in other important areas, like the staff's bbq skills and the timeliness of serving. And generally the staff has no problem paying basic attention to me and conversing with me in a basic fashion (or further).

Oh, and please consider bringing back the crab and...

I have been to all the 老乾杯. My best experience was decades ago in Taipei at their original store. The worst are the ones in Shanghai. They have expanded quite quickly in recent years and probably don’t have adequate QC or training now. This was my first time here and was well received by Eason. He properly prepared all the dishes and explained the cuts and cooking time. We had 2 additional servers that rotated and all were informative and well trained. Having read other reviews I think it could be a hit or miss with this franchise. While my experience...

First of all, if you love meat... DON’T eat here! It will ruin all steak for you! Call me Gordon Ramsey but the service is truly rubbish, all of the service had bad attitudes and they don’t care if you enjoy the food or not. They are very unorganized and I can’t even describe how slow the service was, heck my cousin ACTUALLY fell asleep. Further more, the beef was too greasy and quiet unpleasant. Don’t even start about the price... such little food for such a high amount price. So for the sake your satisfactory don’t eat there. Heck, I DARE you...