Dao Authentic Asian Cuisine — Restaurant in Corpus Christi

I used to love this place. I am new to Corpus Christi and since moving here i have found that good cuisine is very limited. Anytime id want to eat out id look up places and read reviews that rated a place highly, only to get to the restaurant and wonder if the reviews were even real or if i was at the right restaurant. I fell in love with the fried rice dishes here and anytime id go, id order fried rice and eggrolls. Im a simple woman what can i say? Anyway, I immediately realized how expensive the food was for the amount i was given but honestly it did not bother me as long as the quality was good. I went in and picked up my orders a few times but then got lazy and started having my food delivered. This is when things started to change. Everytime id order from here my order was wrong. Id order shrimp egg rolls and EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. i would get my order and the eggrolls would be pork. One time i ordered a few chicken/beef dishes that were supposed to come with rice sides and itd get delivered sans rice. So id end up paying like 80$-90$ and basically get a piece of chicken and 3 orders of rice. The portions were so small and then they were cheating me out of food i paid for! Finally i decided to stop using delivery and have my husband pick the food up instructing him to check the food before driving off. So one night i ordered the same thing i always ordered, set to pick up via grub hub on Yelp. Husband went to pick it up and was gone over a hour, i called him wondering what was up and he told me that they had once again given pork eggrolls and gave us lo mein instead of rice. I tried their lo mein once before and it was so bad. Bad enough that id never order it again. The noodles were overcooked and slimy. Not even edible. So of course i was upset to be given 4 large orders of lo mein ($33 worth) instead of the rice i ordered. When i asked my husband to please tell them the order was wrong and request i be given fried rice, while on the phone with me, he was told by the guy at the register No. they claimed they made the right order and if i wanted rice id have to pay again for them to make rice. My husband sat there for an additional 30min trying to reason with them about fixing the order to no avail. So i told him to just leave the food, tell them to cancel the entire order and just give my money back. So the guy took the food and told my husband no refunds! I couldnt believe it! They were keeping the food they messed up on and then refusing to return my money! He then told my husband if he had a problem call grubhub and work it out with them. I called grub hub and grub hub called them trying to work out the issue and they wouldnt even work with grub hub! I was able to get my refund via grub hub after about a hour of failed negotiations. I order at this place a couple times a month each time ordering 80-100$ worth of food each time. I literally spend hundreds a month here since moving and it just shocked me how they handled the situation when my order was messed up. I was so angry! It is for this reason that i write a bad review for a place i used to love so much. Customer service goes such a long way, an apology and just fixing their mistake would have gone such a long way. But that isn’t what happened. I will never give them my business again on sheer principle. They arent what they used to be when i started...

This review is based solely on my experience and personal opinion.

We went to Dao Restaurant on Saturday the 4th of Sep 2021. Like I said this was our very first time at DAO and while the food was not bad we were not impressed by anything specific, just an average chinese restaurant in a sketchy neighborhood.

FOOD: We Ordered Spring Rolls, stir-fried Mix of Mushroom and stir-fried eggplants in garlic sauce. SPRING ROLLS= just the cheap frozen spring rolls that you would buy at a convenient store. a roll of dough with no vegetables inside, tasteless and doughy. fairly disgusting. The sauce they came with had no flavor. STIR FRIED MUSHROOMS= they tasted ok. some of the mushrooms had a more intense flavor than others and in general a very bland flavor (lacking taste or flavor or tang). yet again, they did not taste bad. STIR-FRIED EGGPLANTS in GARLIC SAUCE= the eggplants were not stir fried, but DEEP FRIED. super greasy and oily, with a thick "FRIED" like taste and you could barely taste the Garlic sauce. again, yet another meal that lacked of flavor (bland).

STAFF: The waiter that served us was very nice and polite with a good knowledge of their Menu. he took his time explaining us that their Menu has authentic Chinese meals and Americanized chinese meals. they were all nice and polite. we enjoyed that aspect. And what we enjoyed the most is that they brought us exactly what we ordered. They even took a photo of us in the end, very kind.

CLEALINESS: the place was generally clean and neat and once they are not serving customers the staff cleans table and wife the floor. which is usually a very good attitude and habit.

RESTROOMS: Restrooms were clean and neat, they have soap, paper towels, toilette paper and running water and a trash bin. modern looking and pleasant.

PLACE: The place looks like the stereotypic chinese restaurant.... big open space, with very little/no furniture inside, with a very minimalist Asian style décor and design. they have a what they call "EXPOSED" kitchen, so that if you stand and are curious, you can see pretty much anything they do in there, your meal included. nice feature that build confidence over time. The Restaurant itself is just one huge room with quite a few big size wooden tables and quite a few wooden tables for couples. but there is NO privacy if that's what you are looking for. BUT if you are a big family or if you plan a big reunion this is definitely the place for you.

LOCATION: the restaurant is in a pretty sketchy neighborhood, the parking lot has no surveillance and very few light poles. not friendly at night.

TAKE AWAY: they have the take away option and they seemed pretty busy.

PRICES: too expensive for the service they offer and the general quality of the food.

CONCLUSION: I would probably go back only if had no choice. again, not bad but not impressing as well. oh, and I would go back at lunch time,...

I really wanted to love this place. I’ve been wanting to try it for weeks now and when my boyfriend and I finally got a sitter, we decided to come here on a date. The sprite I got tasted like medicine, so I asked for a sweet tea instead. Barely any sugar in it, it wasn’t much of an improvement from the sprite. Our appetizer was pretty good, we got the fried dumplings. My boyfriend absolutely loved the sauce. After we finished those, the part of the course I was most excited about came out—the soup dumplings. Definitely an extremely disappointing first experience with something I’ve been dying to try for years. I’ve never had dumplings with skin/dough so thick. Soup dumplings are supposed to droop on the bottom from the soup, these held their shape and were almost opaque white because of their thickness. They were also very bland. Next came our entrees. My boyfriend’s sweet and sour chicken was decent enough, my beef fried rice was extremely bland, had wayyyy too much egg in it, and the beef was an off-putting shade of pink (likely due to how it was prepared, though I wasn’t a fan). I asked for salt and pepper to put on my rice, which is probably the first time I’ve ever felt the need to do that at a restaurant, and ate what I could manage because I was hungry. We also only saw our own waitress 3-4 times throughout the night. We had to flag down another waiter and waitress to refill my boyfriend’s water and replace my drink. I was unfortunately very disappointed with how our meal turned out. I may be back to give this place another chance in the future and order something else, but the soup dumplings and beef fried rice were extremely...