Ito Kyuemon — Restaurant in Zhongshan District

There is a mandatory 10% service charge (and I confirmed with the waitress) that doesn’t even get paid to the staff!! It goes to the restaurant owner!! What a deceptive business practice.

You MUST order your own set, YOU CANNOT SHARE A SET! Even if your set is 2x the cost of other items, they would rather you order 2 separate $280 items than for you to share one $630 set. My gf and I went in purely to try the $630 set. Everything else looked underwhelming and not worth the price. I’ve never heard of a business that would rather make less money given the two options…

I can understand why the service is garbage. The staff don’t even get paid the service fee. The whole point of a service fee (tip) is for your staff to do well and EARN it by providing good service! This is obviously a tourist trap looking to take advantage of tipping culture without providing the service that comes with it.

We left and didn’t order anything because the waitress kept rushing us to make an order. It wasn’t crowded nor was there a line up, yet they treated us like we were taking up space that other customers could use. It’s hard to decide what else to order when the rest of the menu is unappetizing, and you keep rushing us with bad attitude.

Don’t waste your time here. An establishment that has mandatory service fee that are not paid to their staff is just a greedy establishment looking to deceive their customers for...

Rest of my party was looking for parking on a busy night and like most restaurants would not seat until they showed up. (Total 3 people)

Got tired of waiting so asked to seat for one and order and even to pay the bill before my party showed up and get reseated again with them but they said that would be an exception 🤷‍♀️and refused even though they would have made double the amount of $.

When party finally arrived they proceeded to list all the rules for dining in - cash only, 60 minutes total dining time, everyone must order and some other random things (I stopped listening after the third rule)

Then said we needed to confirm it was ok before we could start ordering.

Best part is their tables never even filled up before, during and after we left. (At least half empty the entire time)

Terrible dine in experience for matcha desserts you can probably experience at similar shops across the city.

Too many hoops to jump through would not recommend. Food not worth...

I had a Matcha Milk Shaved Ice, which had always been my favourite flavour of shaved ice. The vanilla ice cream on the top went well with matcha sauce. Most importantly, the matcha shaved ice was the most authentic and best one I’d ever eaten. The level of crunchiness the shaved ice had here was beyond description. The dango (Japanese glutinous circular dumpling) was chewy and gluey. The complimentary tea wasn’t hot but not cold either.

However, I didn’t eat the red beans because I wasn’t fond of the taste as always so I had no idea how it tasted.

In conclusion, it was absolutely overpriced but the greatest authenticity of matcha shaved ice definitely lied in this place. No wonder this matcha café has a history of almost 2 centuries. The interior was also nicely decorated. Overall, without any doubts, it’s a...