FEAST - Artisan Dumpling, Poke and Tea House 家宴 — Restaurant in Madison

I kind of had a similar experience as the previous reviewer. The ambience seemed great upon entry and we were excited to try this place. We were seated after an expected delay of half an hour. No issue with that. We were fairly warned and we decided it was worth the wait. But…we found that it wasn’t. Once we were seated it took a while for our server to come take our order or even greet us with water. We placed the order and then half an hour later we were told that they were out of tofu. So we modified the order…it must have taken another 45 minutes to get our order after that and even then they missed part of it. The other part came another 15-20 minutes later. You might ask…well what did you order that took so much time!! Well..potstickers and wonton soup. Plus springrolls. I get wanting to make things fresh…I get food prep taking time…what sucked was zero updates about the delays…no checking in with us if the food was ok or if we needed anything else…missing part of the order….no apologies for any of these issues…and the worst part was when my order did arrive…the plate with potstickers was soaked in oil…head to toe. I moved the plate to be in front of me and there was oil underneath it and on the edges. Not acceptable. And extremely unprofessional. Given the experience we had and seeing how inefficient this place seemed to be (people waiting to speak with reception and reception being unattended for long periods of time and people finally leaving or just standing around waiting for long periods of time…while tables around us were left uncleared..also for long stretches of time)…I will be really surprised if this place will stay open for too long. Here in Madison….people are used to GREAT food and even better service. I wanna hope that this was a one off thing and they will do better…I hope they do…but I will certainly not be going here again and I will certainly not be recommending anyone else to try it. And yeah…the food was just “fine” on top of all that bad service....

We made a 7:45 reservation for 4. Arrived at 7:45 on the dot and were told "we don't have any tables." We reiterated that we have a reservation. The hostess checked and confirmed that we did, in fact, have a reservation, and then said, again, "we don't have any tables right now. We asked why do you take reservations if you don't, you know, reserve tables. This seemed overly complex for the hostess, who once again said "we don't have any tables right now." When asked when she might have a table she told us "I don't know, maybe fifteen minutes." We decided to stay rather than try to find something else at that time. We were seated almost thirty minutes late. To be fair, I guess, a table did become available in fifteen minutes. It took the hostess another fifteen to clear it, clean it, and reset it for four people. It probably would have gone faster if she'd used two hands (I'm not being sarcastic, I watched her clear one item to the back of the house at a time, using only one hand). Once seated it took the server another ten minutes to get to us. Once he did things picked up some. The food is good. Not "OH my god I need to come back and try everything on the menu" good, but it was good. We had the crab Rangoon (which I wouldn't order again), and pork buns (which were very good) as appetizers. We had lobster dumplings and cuttlefish dumplings; steamed, at the waiter's recommendation. The lobster were excellent, the cuttlefish didn't really have much flavor. We also had an order of pan fried beef and onion dumplings (excellent) and very good sticky rice shu mai with mushrooms. There was an option for sausage with the sticky rice shu mai, but they were out of sausage. The kitchen was pretty slow, but the food seemed freshly made to order and that's worth the trade off of taking a bit longer to come out. The room is nice, but very loud. It was good food, but not good enough to excuse being seated a half hour late for a reservation (to be fair, no place is...

I wanted to like this place more than I actually ended up liking it. On entry, you can see that the place is well decorated and has a generally great atmosphere (soft lighting, background music, etc.). We had a small wait before a table was available, so we sat at the bar. In the whole time we were at the bar, there was no bartender; they appeared to be off doing other things. We were eventually seated in a lovely little alcove, but it took nearly 10 minutes for anyone to drop off water and even longer for anyone to greet us and ask about ordering drinks/appetizers. It felt like the front of the restaurant was understaffed. We eventually ordered, and our food came out in a very reasonable amount of time. My group ordered a wide sampling of things from the menu. Everything we ordered looked great from a presentation standpoint. While eating, we all came to the conclusion that everything was good, but nothing made us "wow" or "yum" or express anything other than just "this is fine." When factoring in price, we were generally disappointed for a few things (e.g. four single-bite soup dumplings for $13 is a bit ridiculous). Overall, I'm not disappointed that I tried this place, but I don't imagine I will come back unless I have a friend who really...