The Orient Express — Restaurant in Wales

I just had the single worst experience I have ever had with a food delivery.

To start with, the order was late. This alone would have not bothered me so much. I rang the restaurant to let them know and they told me the driver was stuck in traffic. Ok, fine.

Then I had a phone call from the driver. She told me she was outside but was unable to park and told me to be quick. Keep in mind she already sounded stressed out at this point before I had even had a chance to interact with her.

I went outside and she was not there. I rang her back and explained to her that she needed to come to the west side of the building. I told her the building name and told her another building as a point of reference for her to navigate.

She then rang me back and asked me to direct her. Bear in mind I am not a driver and do not know the roads in Cardiff because I am a new student here. I told her to turn left at a road I thought she could turn left at and it turned out she couldn't. That was an honest mistake on my part and I would have happily apologised for that bit if the next part hadn't happened.

When she rang me to tell me this, she immediately launched into blaming me like it was my job to navigate her through Cardiff and was shouting at me down the phone for for not knowing that she could not turn left there. Keep in mind she was already on Newport Road when she rang me. At this point, I responded to her angrily telling her that it shouldn't be my job to navigate her and that as a driver she should be able to figure out how to read a map and get to the place. She just kept repeating that I told her she could turn left, yelling down the phone at me and blaming me for my order being late. I would not have had such an issue over this if I wasn't being yelled at by this woman and blamed for her navigation difficulties. I gave her the name of the building, I gave her a point of reference which she saw by eye, she should have been able to figure out the rest. Let's remember who is doing the job here.

I rang the restaurant and they were no better. The restaurant manager himself seemed like he was trying to blame me for upsetting his driver and when I told him my side of it he seemed to want nothing to do with the issue anymore and offered no sort of apology for the situation.

The driver eventually figured out how to get to me and was very rude to me, telling me I need to learn how roads work, again blaming me for her navigation difficulties.

This is simply not ok and I am not happy with this situation. If it wasnt for the fact this restaurant does good food, I would give zeros all around for this experience and may well not order here again, despite this being my regular place.

I understand that these situations can be stressful when you don't know the roads and I would have a bit more sympathy for her if she hadn't turned on me the way she did, but there is no reason to take it out on the customer like this. It is just appalling to act this way. If you do not know how to handle a situation like this calmly and professionally then I am sorry but you should simply not be working as a...

I have been quite a regular customer with this company for a number of years but have today had a horrible experience I'd like to share.

Ordered through YOYO and the order arrived 50 minutes later. Driver was extremely friendly which is the highlight of the whole situation. Upon opening the food (which wasn't the hottest) I had noticed an item was delivered incorrect. I called the restaurant to notify them and they had mentioned it would be with us in 15 minutes due to their drivers currently being out on the road. I called back after waiting almost 30 minutes and asked for a refund as it was late in the evening and our meal was over. The person who I spoke to at the restaurant was extremely rude. He kept trying to blame other things and I asked why he couldn't have updated us as to it being late which he just got more argumentative and blamed everything else apart from his poor management. We are extremely busy and haven't had time is something he mentioned. If you are too busy please ensure staffing and management of online orders are correctly managed. He eventually agreed to refunding us and hung up the phone (I'll be very surprised if I receive this refund).

We had actually stopped ordering from this business recently due to their extremely poor food hygiene rating from their EHO visit last year but decided to give them another shot. In hindsight we now are regretting this. The EHO/food hygiene rating now seems to have been addressed and fixed by the restaurant.

A word of advice for the owners of Orient Express. Customer service is invaluable and is a key way to keep your business operating. Rude and arrogant service will not keep you afloat. You have a vast amount of other takeaways within close proximity to yourselves and returning customers are the most important. Your appalling customer service has lost you a customer today which contributes around £500-600 per year to your business.

Please use this as a learning curve and treat any new customers who come through to you as great as you used to...

I posted a review a year ago to say that it was our go-to Chinese and that the food is great, but after my experience on Tuesday, I think it's time to find another Chinese takeaway.

We placed our order on their website and were told the food would be here by 20:20. We waited until 20:45 to call and ask for an update. The man on the phone barely let my partner finish his sentence before asking for the post code, he then said it was on the way. Half an hour later, we called back as the order still hadn't arrived and again, the man interrupted us over the phone to say that there was no point us calling them back when we had already been told the delivery driver was on the way and we weren't the only ones who ordered. They ended up blaming traffic (we'd checked Google maps before calling, there was no traffic) and saying they were really busy. They didn't apologise when we said we had ordered 1h40 ago. The food finally arrived and was suspiciously warm considering it would have been with the driver for at least half an hour, according to their timeline. I'm really disappointed by my recent experience. As always, I have nothing negative to say about the food, but having a takeaway is meant to be a bit of a treat, and there's nothing enjoyable about waiting 2 hours for your order to arrive and being yelled at on the phone when you...