Sichuan Spicy Bay — Restaurant in Alhambra

(I think the correct spelling of this restaurant should be "Sichuan Spicy Bay", but Yelp has it as "Szechuan Spicy Bay".) I was here with other lovers of spicy food, and we all enjoyed it very much. There is free parking in this lot. They share it with other businesses like the Fresh Farm Outlet.

I was here on a weekday dinner around 5:30 PM, and the place was filling up quickly. They mostly have tables for up to four people, so our party of five had to wait until everyone arrived to be seated. There is only one big round table that can seat parties of 6-10. By the time we were done eating, there was a waitlist! Apparently this restaurant is highly rated on "xiao hong shu", also known as Little Red Book or RED, which is like China's version of Instagram.

For five people, we ordered: -4 individual rice bowls ($1.50 each) -baked fish with mala style $39.99. (You can choose other styles, like pickled pepper, rattan pepper, ginger, garlic, etc.) This was served in a huge dish that took over 50% of the table. The fish itself wasn't that big and was placed over a bed of bean sprouts. The fish was hard to eat because the meat would crumble like feta cheese. There were lotus root slices and cucumber pieces scattered here and there. Even more scarce were black fungus pieces. It was flavorful. Next time we want to try the frog, which seemed to be more popular. -mala dry pot with fatty intestines $21.99. The intestines are fried and crunchy on the outside. It came with a lot of veggies. -house special stir fry cabbage $13.99. We ordered this thinking we needed a veggie dish, but everything else had too many veggies. This dish itself was good - albeit on the sweet side - but we probably didn't need it. -cumin spicy lamb $21.99. This dish came out last. We were almost done with everything else. It was 50% coriander and leek, which were so vibrantly green. The lamb had good flavor though.

I would come back to...

Terrible Service – Waited 1.5 Hours, Lost Our Table Over 10 Seconds?!

My friends and I waited an hour and a half for a table, only to lose it over a one-minute delay. The way the staff handled it was completely unreasonable!

What Happened: 19:27 – The restaurant called to let us know our table was ready, but since we were in the car, we missed the call. 19:28 – As soon as we saw the missed call, we rushed into the restaurant within a minute, even arriving before the next group. Despite this, the host immediately gave our table away with a bad attitude, saying, “You didn’t pick up, so we thought you weren’t coming.”

The most ridiculous part? They only waited 10 seconds before deciding we had "given up" our spot. If we had seen the call several minutes later, that would be understandable—but we were there within a minute! No apology, no effort to accommodate us, just a rude response telling us to wait for the next available table because “the other customers wouldn’t agree”. So, we waited 1.5 hours, but they couldn’t even wait 10 seconds for us? Do we not count as customers too?

The attitude of the staff was beyond disappointing. Not only did they refuse to give us our table back, but they kept giving us dirty looks the entire time. Seriously, RongHe Sichuan Cuisine, is this how you treat...

Food was AWESOME. My table ordered the ChengDu Spicy Boiled Roast Duck, Salted Egg Yolk with Corn (this was bomb), Stir Fry Bamboo Shoot, and one other spicy item that I can’t recall. The portions were GREAT for the pricing, more than enough for 4 people to eat with some leftover for the next day. Service is what you’d expect for a small restaurant that’s packed to the brim; we had to flag down the sole waiter (bless his soul, you could tell the man was overworked with no backup) each time we needed something, but eventually he did get whatever we needed to us. The restaurant itself is pretty small, and turnover on the tables can be a bit slow, which in turn makes it a bit of a lengthy wait to get seated. I saw a lot of takeout orders going out the door while waiting too, and with the great food, I could see why the wait is what it is. Will definitely come again, but probably not during the weekend/...