Ryce Asian Bistro — Restaurant in Crested Butte

We’ve been walking by this restaurant for YEARS without eating here because someone in our family doesn’t like asian food, so we never got around to trying it. We finally decided to go this week and I’m so flustered that we didn’t try this place earlier, because it is now MY FAVORITE FOOD IN ALL OF CRESTED BUTTE. In the past I dreamt of visiting and eating Pitas in Paradise or Teocalli Tamale, but Ryce has now surpassed absolutely everything in cravability BY FAR for our group.

The orange chicken has the best, highest quality tempura fry on it that I’ve ever had in my life with the best orange sauce I’ve ever had, and I regularly buy different orange sauces to make this dish with at home.

The miso soup is THE BEST MISO SOUP I’ve ever had in my life as well, the miso flavoring is extremely dense and the vegetables and tofu in the soup make me want to cry with joy because they’re such world-class perfection.

The pad thai is saucy and FILLED with tender protein of your choice- I go for a beef and chicken combination and just like with the rest of this review, the beef and chicken were no exception to everything being the best I’ve ever had. The protein was some of the highest quality, juiciest, fall-apart-in-your-mouth chunks of perfection around and paired with the delicious noodles and sauce that screams with flavor created a dish that surpassed whatever other pad thais I’ve ever tried elsewhere around North America.

And there’s one more dish I NEED to talk about. The lettuce wraps. We get it with the ground chicken, and the mix of chicken with bell peppers and various vegetables put onto the perfectly wedged crispy piece of lettuce with a little bit of their perfect white rice is so grandiosely incredible in taste that the first time I borrowed a bite of it from another at the table, I got internally furious at the fact that this dish could literally replace any burger meal I’ve ever had. I’d take the best tasting and cooked hamburger in the world and slap it to the ground in disrespect just to have a single bite of Ryce’s lettuce wraps with chicken. I cannot overstate this dish enough; trying it literally changed my life for the better.

We’re now going back to eat here between eating out at other various establishments, because we can’t leave behind the world-class miso soup, tempura chicken and lettuce wraps. How many times can I say perfection in one review? This place is so good it’s making me test that limit.

The picture included is of the Pad Thai dish with beef / chicken...

There’s a reason this place is spelled with a “y” instead of an “I” and that’s because you will be wondering why you paid for such a flavorless meal and bad service. I am only posting one star because it is required in order to leave a review. When we arrived the restaurant was packed so it looked promising, we gave our name and told us it would be about an hour. There were 6 of us waiting on one table to leave. After waiting over an hour we went in to see about how much longer (if we should continue to wait or go find somewhere else), we were told we were next to be seated so we stayed. Little did we know it was going to be another 45 minutes. The wait staff never politely nudged the one table we were waiting on or hinted to the table that people were waiting. Most restaurants will politely nudge you on your way if they are super busy and a table is just sitting and talking after paying. We were finally seated after waiting almost 2 hours. We should have left because it was all downhill from there. At this point we were the only ones seated on the patio. Our waitress we polite but awkward. We asked for straws after ordering that we’re not brought to us. Once our food came out we asked again and someone went to get some. After our food was dropped off no one came back to check on at any point. We had to go in to the restaurant to find someone for a fork for our 7 year old. After the long wait and how crowded the place was we were excited and hopeful about our food thinking it’d be worth the wait. We were incredibly wrong. There was a variety of 3 different dishes ordered between the table, they were all horrible. The pad Thai had zero flavor what so ever and the beef tasted as if it was boiled. It was so bland and flavorless and the beef was mush y yet tough all at the same time. The Penang curry was also flavorless, zero spice, with the same weird beef. The sesame chicken was basic flavor but the chicken was so tough to bite through as if it were over cooked or old. This was the least flavored food I have ever had. Regretfully we paid for our meals and the only “compensation” we got was a free bowl of rice. The plain white rice was the most flavorful...

I try to be fair when leaving a bad review. The food is actually good, however the system the restaurant operates on is very poorly managed. A restaurant at this price point is not a takeout-focused establishment, or at least it should not be. I fully understand wanting to push out as many to go orders as possible for the money, however there has to be a point where you prioritize customers inside your restaurant over takeout orders. Our food took an hour and a half from the time that we ordered it. In that time we saw 25-30 takeout orders go out the door, while our waitress seemed puzzled as to why our food was taking so long. Repeated polite inquiries seemed to go nowhere until my wife finally resorted to being assertive and rude, at which point our food magically appeared less than 5 minutes later. I can't understand why you would show customers who are eating in your restaurant, drinking alcohol, and tipping your waitresses so little priority. There was no offer to comp anything and we were left with the feeling that the restaurant could simply care less about the experience their customers have while dining in. A little professionalism goes a long way, and that includes not allowing takeout orders to overwhelm your kitchen at the expense of your dining room. It is a shame because the restaurant has a lot to offer but gets bogged down in the service aspect of their operation. We will pass on Ryce in the future, it takes more than a kitchy spelling to make a good...