Ugly Dumpling — Restaurant in Fairfax

Sat at the bar, Bartenders were friendly and nice - a lot of our issues stemmed with what was perceivably management issues. Overall, the food we had was good. Not enough to make our experience worth it.

We came in on a Friday night around 6:30pm, weather was nice outside. We asked to sit outside because of the nice weather and were told they were not allowing outdoor seating at this time. The wait for a table was 20 minutes so we chose the bar. We noticed about 15 minutes later that a larger part was escorted to outdoor seating to eat which I thought was odd.

The bartenders were seemingly busy from this domino effect, and we had to wait for the counter to be cleaned. Once we sat and attempted to order, the first (2) things we asked for were not available. My concern about this was being that one of them was a "signature item" and this was the beginning of dinner rush on a Friday night. So if its not available for us, how many other parties are they gonna have to say no to?

We ordered other things, the service is designed to be quasi-Dim Sum (as things are ready, they are brought out in no particular order). We had ordered the chicken fried rice and a waiter brought out what we thought was chicken fried rice. About 10 minutes later, another waiter brought another fried rice - we turned this one down thinking it was to the wrong party but we noticed that that order seemed more like chicken fried rice than our order. We asked about it and it seems that were given the wrong kind of fried rice (there were eggs, vegetables, nothing that was seemingly obvious pointing to this being the wrong kind and we had never eaten here before).

Throughout the meal, I ended up having to ask for one of the food items more than once as it was forgotten, the bartender had to rush to the kitchen to figure out what happened.

We also had 3-4 times where waiters brought over food that we did not order.

To top it off, when we finally sorted out the chicken fried rice ordeal -- the time it took was so long we ordered it go. This had been ordered with a small dietary modification which was written on the receipt and acknowledged by the bartender. The order came out incorrect and I checked it before leaving. I brought it to their attention so they sent it back to redo it which was then correctly done. We were obviously frustrated at this point and the bartender attempted to bring the manager out to help reconcile the ongoing issues during our experience. We were told the a manager was "busy in the kitchen". We were given the choice of a free-entree coupon or the option to come back the next day to talk to the manager. We found this odd as it would have been more understandable if the manager was, lets say, busy with another customer.

TL;DR: We wanted to like this place and it may deserve a shot in the future. The food is good but not worth the headache of what seems to be struggling management. This seems to trickle into the mood of the staff because they have to constantly put out the fires. Hope this changes...

My sister and I came here to try it and found it to be very underwhelming. We went around noon and it was super busy -about a 20 minute wait, which wasn’t too bad. But the reason for the 20 minute wait? Their kitchen was backed up. We are BIG fans of Bobs Shanghai and Peter Chang. So we were excited to find a place closer to us.

We were so disappointed that we couldn’t even finish our food. We ordered quite a bit off the menu bc wanted to try everything. The dishes ordered were: dynamite shrimp (flavorless and smothered in spicy mayonnaise), crab Rangoon (wontons stuffed with cream cheese, did not have any crab), baby back ribs (super chewy and difficult to eat), calamari (came out cold) pork and crab soup dumplings (probably the biggest disappointment- bland and did not have any soup in them), sesame noodles (not bad), spicy noodles (drenched in what seemed like only soy sauce) , another noodle dish (mid), and spicy wontons (took forever to come out and was cold).

After the rave reviews we anticipated that everything would be delicious. We took photos but quickly became disappointed and didn’t even bother to do so for the rest of our dishes. The food in general was bland, and felt very low effort . We got two drinks which were also not that great. Not sure if it’s because this location just opened, but some more work needs to be done for improvement in all aspects.

The bill came out to $120 ish, which is not worth it in my opinion for bland, under-seasoned food. Also our waitress Anna or Hannah was very low energy and seemed annoyed whenever we asked for stuff. “No problem, no problem” she said after each request and when we ordered our food. There should be “no problem” bc you work here and are paid to do your job instead of treating paying customers as an inconvenience. Staff needs more training, as they were overwhelmed with all the customers trying to get in. One girl snapped at another girl, in front of us and it just did not seem professional.

Never had such an unseasoned experience before. As for now, we will stick to our usual spots, Bobs Shanghai and...

Pretty big XLB enthusiast, happy to see a place open up so close to home. About a 45-1 hour wait on a Sunday evening, a week after opening, so we chose to sit at the bar. The menu was not extensive, which is nice. We initially ordered two orders of Pork XLB, cucumbers, and braised beef noodle soup. We wanted the green beans and pork/crab XLB, but they ran out. They tried multiple times to upsell a shrimp appetizer, which was strange, and I had no interest in it. Iced tea came quickly, was made at the bar, and was pretty good. The noodles came. They were a serviceable bowl of beef noodle soup, but there was nothing to write home about, and it was a small portion. I would give it 3/5. The XLB came, shape was decent, they are handmade, the filling was decent, and overall flavor was pretty good, 4/5. They are very stingy with the ginger, like three pieces in the sauce plate, which was laughable. We asked for more, and we got like three more pieces. Skip the cucumber, 2/5. There is no flavor, and it didn’t seem that fresh. Okay, we decided to go for a 3rd order of Pork XLB because it was decent. I asked the bartender/server to add another order, and he came over with the Toast machine and punched it in. We waited more than 40 minutes, and there was still no XLB. After watching people next to us at the bar get their XLB, we asked for the status of our 3rd order. He said Oh, looks like it didn’t go through and asked if we still wanted it. I said no and asked for the check. Check came 3rd XLB order was on the check, asked the server to recheck it and take it off, he mentioned it’s not on there without looking when it’s on, took it back and reprinted it again without the 3rd order like it magically disappeared. Was getting up to leave, he said the system had a malfunction, it’s okay, man, say you forgot to put in the order, and you added to the check, it’s fine, no need to lie. TLDR, decent pork XLB, bad service, long wait for a table, opening pains, I will probably give it another shot again at a table and with other stuff on the...