Hot Wok — Restaurant in Cypress

This honest, but fair and critical, review refers to our order placed on Friday 24 January 2025 at Hot Wok - Cypress.

I always try to start my reviews positively, and I can honestly say that this Hot Wok's Hunan Double Delight and Chicken Lo Mein are excellent. BUT, this review drops precipitously from there. OMG.

It's so bad that I don't even know where to start. How about with the service? Wow. OMG. Just wow. In this case it was literally scary, because, being diabetic as I am, I need to eat on a regular schedule, or my blood sugar can drop to dangerously low levels, and it did that evening because, as you'll see in the attached screenshots, our order was due at 7:22 PM, but arrived at 8:50 PM. Wow. OMG. Wow.

My wife, Shih-Ting, who grew up in Taiwan, and whose first language is Mandarin Chinese, wanted me to call Hot Wok - Cypress and chew them out at 7:35 PM, but I said no, let's wait, they're probably just busy. OOPS! I did call them around 7:45 PM, with my wife and our daughter sitting at the dinner table with me, and I very kindly asked why our food was so late. The man said that the manager needed to call me back, and I said OK. I was uncharacteristically nice at this point.

A woman did call back a few minutes later, and I put her on speakerphone so that my wife and daughter could hear her. This "manager" said that she was sorry about our order being late. She said that she never received it and asked how I placed the order. I WAS SIMPLY STAGGERED WHEN SHE SAID THAT. OMG. WOW. I said that I placed the order on the Hot Wok website, that I received a confirmation text which I responded to successfully, and was confirmed by a confirmatory email of the above (please see the attached evidence proving that I am correct). MY ORDER TO HOT WOK DEFINITELY WENT THROUGH AND YET THEY WERE COMPLETELY CLUELESS AND HAD NO IDEA THAT THEY EVEN HAVE A WEBSITE. THE “MANAGER” WAS HONESTLY SURPRISED AND WAS CONFUSED AT FIRST. GRR!!!

I mean honestly, folks reading this far, I know that these restaurants get orders from Doordash (ripoff artists, btw...), Instacart (still super expensive, but not nearly as bad as Doordash...), etc., but if they don’t even know about their own websites, then WTF???

So that she could find my order, this “manager” asked me what my phone number is. I said, “Uhhh, the one you called to talk to me right now…”. My wife and daughter were laughing so hard (again, I was on speaker phone) that they literally covered their mouths to not be heard by the Hot Wok “manager”. She looked at her caller ID, looked up my phone number, and found my order at approximately 7:50 PM. She said that she would make it immediately and get it to us right away. Amazingly, I wasn’t angry yet.

Because I cook ~80% of the food we eat, I didn’t want to spoil my appetite for Chinese delivery, so I didn’t eat, even though I could feel my blood sugar dropping. At 8:48 PM, and totally fed up at that point with all this hogwash, I called again – on speaker phone - and the same woman answered. I said something like “ma’am, when I spoke to you an hour ago you said that you’d get us our food ASAP” and this woman said that she hadn’t spoken to me, looked up my order, and said that the driver had just arrived. I hung up, and my wife, who is a professional musician and therefore has a keen ear, said “that was the same woman you spoke to before." I said, “Thanks. I know.” THAT WAS WHEN I FINALLY GOT ANGRY. NOT JUST HANGRY, BUT ANGRY. I HATE BEING LIED TO!

The driver finally arrived (Ring photo attached, with face intentionally obscured) and I chewed his butt off.

Hot Wok’s Thai summer rolls were good, egg rolls and crab Rangoon were OK (but how do you screw those up?), egg drop and hot and sour soups were excessively thick, and their orange chicken is mediocre at best.

To add insult to injury, we were never offered so much as a discount, let alone a refund. And I had made the HUGE MISTAKE of giving a big tip when I ordered. Wow. Just wow.

TRUST ME WHEN I SAY THAT THERE ARE BETTER OPTIONS FOR CHINESE DELIEVERY/PICKUP...

First time visit, order to go because my little one wanted Chinese after blood drawn and just wanted to go home. Saw this was in the area and order 2 chicken and fried rice. "Mark" picked up my order said it will be 5 minutes and in 8 min I was there. Every thing was nice and Mark was very kind. This is where it gets awkward, Mark tells me the cost, I give him my card and then points to where the Tip Amount slot is. Im sorry but tipping under pressure never works for me. Horrible way to do business. With that being said, I didn't leave a tip and paid for the $16.78 for the 2 small bowls. Mark then had a very visible mug and takes off to the back, he takes a while to bring the food out. Awful feeling and it shouldn't be like this. I shouldn't feel you are doing something with the food in the back because I didn't leave you a tip for taking my order. Please don't pressure tip, nor get the food ready after you see if I tip you or not. Good business practice, be kind to people at all times. To say the least, Mark left such a bad feeling, I threw away the food and went to good ol Chick Fil A. Where is always...

It was a few month back me and husband went to dine in for dinner. We ordered two things couldn’t finish so decided for to go. A short hair lady came wearing glasses and offered to help pack the food so i was like it’s okay i can do it. So she left i payed the bill and left for my car i accidentally took the merchants copy instead of the customer copy. So she ran to my car to give me my copy of bill which was okay my husband took the copy and gave her the merchant copy and i also apologized for my mistake. Then she was like “ oh you didn’t add tips how much would you add tips” so i said i don’t want to add tips today so she cusses me at her own language and stomped my car and left. I would like to change the fact that a customer only add tips when they are happy with their services. People needs to change the fact that tipping is a must NO IT...