London Chinatown Restaurant — Restaurant in London

This is going to be a real struggle to find a positive. The service was non existent and the food was not good. Whilst looking at the menu outside my husband really fancied some of the dishes, especially the dim sum, so we thought we would give it a go for lunch, one of the staff asked if we were just two persons, which was practically the whole effort at being welcoming or even interested in the customers in general, for the duration of our visit. We were marched to a table, without a single word, then given a piece of paper and a pen, that was it, no recommendations or "would you like a drink or anything", absolutely nothing. We looked through the menus and made a few choices to share, did our best to find them on the piece of paper supplied and waited an age to get the attention of anyone working there, by the way I should also add at this point it was not very busy. The woman came and took our paper and we asked if we could get some drinks too, we were not asked if we would like any. After about 10 - 15 minutes "some" of our food arrived... Stir Fry Glass Noodles with Beef Brisket, ok, this was probably the dish that had the most flavour, even then it wasn't great. Noodles with Shredded Chicken, salty as hell, not one single distinctive taste, I could have literally been eating anything, bland and flavourless apart from the excessive salt. Chicken Feet in Black Bean - awful (or maybe foul :) ), tasted like it had been sat cooking away to itself for hours, absolutely devoid of any taste, just a greasy mess. Fried Yam with Meat, the low point of the meal, which in itself is impressive, I'm struggle to even describe this, again tasted of nothing, but the filling was absolutely alien to my palette, it somehow managed to be moist, dry and flavourless all at the same time, if you can imagine watering down a tin of corned beef and boiling it to death, then thickening it with way too much cornstarch you are in the ballpark of what this was, one bite was more than enough of this dish for the rest of my life, dreadful. After a wait of another 10-15 minutes our final dishes arrived, but by this point we had truly lost our appetite. Again no interaction or engagement from the staff, just threw the dishes on the table and left without a single word. One of the final dishes was dim sum, this was what had originally enticed my husband into the restaurant, this was served without any condiments like chilli oil or chilli crisp or dipping sauces, my husband asked for chilli crisp and again this was dumped at our table without a word. The dim sum were so generic and flavourless that they could have been any frozen cheap supermarket variety on the planet, there were no distinctive flavours or textures, and that seemed an appropriate underline for our dining experience.... until we finally got some more interaction from one of the staff, asking if we would like to add a tip when paying the bill!!!.

Possibly the worst Chinese food I have ever eaten in my whole life, flavourless, over priced, and accompanied by the worst service we received anywhere in London over our 4 day stay.

Avoid this place like the plague. Awful, just...

Given one menu between three to begin with, and had to ask for more. Menus were in tatters and falling apart.

Cutlery was dirty, very cheap and the bare minimum (one fork had an old fragment of rice between the spokes that looked like it had been there for so long it was almost sentimental).

We were sat outside on a cold Saturday evening directly against a busy street and large queue (happy to do so) as Chinatown was incredibly busy. This is important later.

It took a while to get the waitress' attention to place our order, and even once when we did get attention, she left the restaurant boundary to go for a walk for some reason.

Payment was taken upfront when the order was placed, and sitting outside in the cold, it took well over an hour for our first starter to arrive (squid rings) and it came with no sauces. Despite that, it was gone in minutes.

We asked behind the rest of our food, only to come to the realisation that nobody had a clue about our order, at which point we started seeing customers who were behind us in the queue leaving the restaurant having eaten indoors.

We were offered a table inside which we accepted. The waitress rudely stopped us from leaving the table to go back to collect our used cutlery, dish and tissue to take with us.

Our second starter arrived a while after and was cold (not lukewarm, not stone cold). We had to ask to have it heated, where it was put in a microwave and returned half hot, half cold.

We had to eventually complain about the service and inform them that we would leave if not served, wanting a refund on unserved items. It did look like they had forgotten our order because it seemed they were trying to read our ticket on the table on the fly.

Slowly but surely the food began to come out. Most of it was pretty average or worse, and only two dishes of seven were better than average and possibly worth the listed price.

I'm sure this isn't the common experience for most that come here, but it definitely was not uncommon as we noticed in our many hours there that some others were going through the same thing.

Don't take the chance. Only go here if you don't have other choices, but there are a great many better establishments in Chinatown worth waiting for or trying before...

The service was an absolute nightmare. The waitress who came to get our order was in a mad rush.

When she asked us what drinks we’d like, we were about to start ordering while one of our friends was just glancing through - but that waitress decided to storm off saying she’ll come later even though the rest of us were ready. And when I called her back saying the rest of us were ready in fact, she clenched her hand and eyes in the side and then came back. Like I’m sorry? If you didn’t want me to call you back, you shouldn’t be in such a mad rush that you can’t notice that everyone except one person is ready to order?

When bringing the dishes to us, she was running around and dumping them onto the table aggressively. She brought over a Diet Coke with such aggression, and poured it with the same aggression - that only 20% of the glass got filled because the rest of the glass was fizz - and so she had to leave the can instead of clearing it like she wanted to. At this point it was better we poured our own Diet Coke.

When asked for a takeaway box to pack 2 dishes of our dishes, we didn’t even have a chance to ask for 2 boxes, she cut off the one requesting this and spoke loudly over her assuming it was one box, and brought only one.

When splitting the bill at the end, she brought over the entire bill, and when we asked to split it she was mad and started yelling at us that we should tell her at the start next time, because in this particular restaurant they need to print bills a different way for splitting the bill. Like what? This is not something the customer is supposed to know. This is something our waitress is supposed to inform us about or ask us about herself, before printing the bill, because this “method” is exclusive to their restaurant. In every other restaurant, they bring me the bill, we ask for a split, they split the charge on the card reader. Not a single place have I had to ask in advance, to have 7 receipts printed for the bill to be split 3 ways!?

So yeah good was quite good and portions too. But overall customer service was crazy. We were treated like we were...