Cooking Girl — Restaurant in Houston

I like the food here, don't get me wrong. However now I have seen two different incidents where I believe Cooking Girl should change the way they do customer service.

My experience, I went there a day before a major holiday. This is a place I normally eat at. The waitress greeted me at the door and asked me "how many people?" I said just me. She says, ok you sit at the bar. I said no, I would like to sit at a table. There were 4 or more tables open that day. She said, no the table reserve for larger party, you sit at bar. I said no, I'm paying, I would like a table. She says to me, no only bar available. So I walked out. Just because its one person, they cannot simply assume I will order only 1 dish or that a party of 2 or more would order 2 dishes and not just share 1.

I didn't want to post this review, however I will....2nd thing is, you have to ask for soy sauce and white pepper. They don't simply bring them to you. You also have to ask for bowls. Ridiculous.

Finally my friend went there with 6 people. 5 adults and a 2 year old. Cooking girl charged them the meal plus a 20% gratuity for 6 people because they counted the 2 year old as a normal adult. The 2 year old did not even eat. They can't eat that spicy food. The waiter when questioned said, "oh our computer does that".

Really?

Well there's a new restaurant that opened up next to Cooking Girl called Hu's Cooking. Its the same style food and the owners are nice. If you're in the area, just walk to the next strip center....you'll find Hu's. Cooking Girl for me has good food, but their service isn't great. For the price they're charging, it needs to be great. I posted the receipt my friend sent me of what they were billed...

I’ve been frequenting the restaurant since the soft opening, and it’s sad to say the quality of the food has been on a steady decline. Here are some examples:

It’s a Chinese restaurant. RICE is the center piece of Chinese cooking, yet we were served old rice which they attempted to revive with a bit of water, so the result was just an unappetizing sticky mess.

With the seafood tofu, the shrimp were small, over cooked and hard. The fish was tilapia, and the tofu was just average. There were 5 small slices of carrots and about 3 pieces of red bell peppers.

The spicy chicken is good when consumed on site; however, if you were to have it as a take out, the fried coating becomes quite inedible.

We’ve also tried the sweet and sour ribs, and it was very disappointing, in so much that we drove back to the restaurant and returned the dish: The ribs looked nothing like the web page photo, (and we know we all eat with our eyes first): they were a brown, soggy lumps immersed in some sweet brown soup.

These dishes have been consistently good, however:

Fish: fish love tofu, hot diving fish, spice hot fish slides.

Appetizers: spicy wood ear, broken heart jelly.

Pork: Hunan style pork

Shrimp: spicy shrimp

Chicken: peppertwin chicken, spicy chicken

Beef: cooling beef, fried beef

We have taken friends there to try to help spread the word about the restaurant, since we don’t have many what one would call “authentic” Chinese restaurants in this area. We are becoming disillusioned with the direction the restaurant is headed: just another place where they cook up some decent food and hope to pass muster with the...

This restaurant has a good sized parking lot. Even though it was busy, we were seated right away. There was a comical mess up with our drinks. My wife ordered a hot tea. Our table got overlooked for a bit so 5 - 10min later, another server came by to ask us for our drink order. We told her what we'd ordered and she went to the bar to expedite it. The lady working the bar brought me my iced tea and a kettle for my wife's hot tea. Only problem was it was an empty tea pot. 😂 I was laughing too hard so my wife took it back up to the bar. The lady apologized and brought it back a few minutes later. My wife poured a cup and the liquid was perfectly clear, like water. We looked inside and there was hot water, but no tea. We were both laughing at this point. It was like something out of a TV comedy drama. The servers were really apologetic about it. They were really understaffed so I can't fault them too much. They were trying their best to keep up. The food was delicious. We got some dumplings to start since we were told the fish we ordered would take at least 30 minutes to prepare. They were actually pretty filling. For our mains, we got the cabbage and striped bass. Both were light and delicious. It was a whole fish so lots of bones to eat around. It had two peppers listed by it on the menu, but it seemed like most of the spice was in the sauce and didn't transfer to the fish itself. Overall, the food was good, and the service was acceptable. Hopefully they can get their staffing figured out so they can focus on...