Spice 24 味 — Restaurant in Edison

If you know anything about NJ, you know that Edison has a large Asian community. If you want good authentic Asian food, then Edison is a good bet. Spice 24 is located in a strip mall with a number of Asian restaurants, an Asian chain supermarket, Korean spa, bakery, etc. First impression was that Spice 24 was really clean and the staff were extremely friendly. We were greeted and seated. A bowl of salted nuts (maybe chestnuts???) were placed on the table with glasses of water. The menu is a QR code, and that’s where it became a little too much work for us. The menu isn’t terribly descriptive for my liking, e.g., pepper beef empanada. That’s the end of the description. Based on the picture, I have a pretty good idea what it might be, but I would have liked to have more information about how the empanada was prepared. Mind you, the English version online said it was a pepper beef empanada, but the QR code menu with Chinese and English called it something entirely different. We figured it was a bun by looking at the picture, but we weren’t expected it to be deep fried. I mean, it was good and we had no complaints, but we just expected steamed or maybe pan fried. There were definitely some challenges with the menu for us so we had to signal the waitress a few times. She was extremely helpful and explained what things were if we had questions. To be clear, we are not that knowledgeable about real Chinese food and this is no fault of the establishment or staff. We’re ok picking things out by pictures on the menu; however, I have some dietary restrictions so I wanted to ensure I didn’t select something I do not eat by accident. Also, clicking and scrolling through a long menu and adding items to the cart before checking out was not my jam. It just felt like too much work for a meal. I cannot tell you exactly what we ended up ordering because we didn’t know exactly what we were clicking on, but what eventually arrived was very good. The portion was large. We shared it between two people and we were full. There was the option to request lower sodium and less oil for the stir fry which I appreciated. Whatever personal issue we had with the menu was countered by the staff’s attentiveness and their ability to make us feel at home. Water was refilled without asking for it, every few minutes our server would check in on us, and they staff genuinely wanted feedback on what we thought about the food. The waitress said she would help us order the next time, so we...

Recently I ordered spice24 from chowbus app. However this restaurant didnot set up the right way to make order in Chowbus. Let’s say if you go to the restaurant and then you can order 5 types of dishes and choose one wok, however, it didnot work this way in Chowbus app, you need to order like 8 dishes to make one wok. I wanted to order 6 dishes in two woks, but it doesnot appear I can do this way. So I wrote in the memo about need two woks and what to put in each wok. The chef didnot check the memo at all when received order, so I got everything cooked in one wok. I called the restaurant manager, and she was very mean/yelling at me. Telling me she doesnot have a Chowbus app, so she could not help me anything and then hang up the phone. I have never seen any restaurant manager mean to customer like her. As manager, her responsibility is to make sure all the app setup applied to their restaurant order. And secondly, chef should also pay attention to the memo costumer sent. Otherwise what’s the point of communicating using online app. They refuse to recognize any mistake they made, manager just said she doesnot use any online ordering app. its very unresponsive way of dealing the ordering issue. What I have seen is a finger-pointing management team from this restaurant, who doesnot take responsibility for mistake they made and rude to the customer. Very...

I went there with 2-3 of my friends on an early Sat evening a little early before 6 pm. I was glad to see it packed and that there was a wait...but not too long of it. Signs of a good restaurant which is busy even at 5:30-5:45pm for dinner. The restaurant is not huge, but clean, neat and busy. The staff seemed quite friendly and helpful. I have had some of the best Chinese / Sichuan food here. I am a vegetarian and got the eggplant starter which was delicious. But the killer of a dish was the entreè which was a veggie hot soup bowl of spicy creamy mala sauce with tons of veggies and rice on the side. This, my friends felt like soul food! :-) i love spicy food and this one satisfied to the T...and some more! My friends who eat meat tried the calamari starter which they said was okay, but their entreè also was a winner. They ordered the spicy creamy mala sauce bowl with some meat/fish and some veggies and side of rice. And they were also extremely happy with the choice. I will be going here again for sure! And wholeheartedly recommend this place for Sichuan/Chinese food lovers. Absolute yumm!!! :-) Give it a try. You will be glad...