Nine Tastes — Restaurant in Cambridge

I've never dealt with such a rude restaurant that gets angry with their customers based on special preferences in their orders. Quite frankly, it's rude and ridiculous. I usually order the Spicy Basil Fried Rice and I have allergies to certain ingredients and I am not able to edit special instructions at all with this restaurant on the DoorDash app. It says, “The store has chosen not to accept special requests. Contact them directly with questions about their menus.” I usually have to call to tell them my preference and the person I spoke with tonight was extremely rude. They were saying that they knew my order already and I should edit the instructions on the DoorDash app. I've told them multiple times over the phone that THEY need to edit this since as a customer, I do not have access to their DoorDash platform to do this! I don't understand why they're getting angry with me when they can’t clearly solve their issue right. I don’t like having to call places to begin with in regards to my preferences and I shouldn’t be made to feel terrible because I’m preventing an allergy attack for myself. Fix your DoorDash special requests option and I won’t have to call anymore!

Update: The restaurant purposely messed up my food because of the fact that I called in regards to my special instructions. They put carrots and all sorts of things in my food on purpose. I got extremely upset over the phone and asked to speak to a manager and the same woman told me that there’s no manager and only staff on board tonight. I can’t believe the complete disrespect. I’ve escalated this with DoorDash and plan to go forward. This restaurant now has temporarily closed on DoorDash because of their stupid mistake. I will never order from this restaurant again and please let this review be proof that you...

It used to be my go-to place for lunch many years back. Not sure if COVID forced a management change, most of the employees are different now and the restaurant had a new menu.

Unfortunately things didn’t change for the better for the restaurant. Few comments from a not-so-great dining experience today:

Summer Lover, aka. Steak fries + small bowl of coconut soup for $10.95… I understand it’s inflation time, but for about 15 slices of fries (one of them so over fried that they don’t even bother to pick it out), and a bowl of soup as a dip? Who uses soup as fries dip? It’s too watery to have fries pick up any soup and the taste together is just strange. A 100% rip off.

Their spicy level. I used to remember when nine’ taste’s spicy level is legitimately spicy, with 🌶, 🌶 🌶, and 🌶 🌶 🌶. The dish I ordered today with three pepper signs, tasted sour and sweet, nothing close to the level of spiciness indicated. One of Thai food’s essences is its spicy level that activates the taste buds. They failed miserably.

Overall, the taste of Thai food has gone downhill since pre-COVID times. I suspect there’s a chance of management and of course, chefs as well, along with a hyper inflated menu items.

As a former loyal customer of Nine-Taste, I would not...

update august 2025: advertised an item as a meat dish, arrived as a bowl of rice with a few pieces of meat, absolutely scammy

thought it was just their service but i guess everything sucks 🤷

august 2024: It was good food. We ordered the pad see ew and drunken noodles. However, the service was bad in terms of bill payment and tipping. The server kept pointing me at the tip amounts and told me that I cannot tip anything else (minimum 18% which is a lot for 2 college students). I told her that I'm not legally obligated to tip her but still put in a custom tip to round up our total amount. She retorted this custom tip, berated/mocked my tip amount and went back to the other servers and tattled about us. All the servers were now staring at us. While tipping culture is toxic in general, the current servers at this place made it...