Panda Express — Restaurant in Mankato

Usually fantastic, but today was terrible, my co-workers and I came for lunch today, we arrived an hour and a half after Panda opened: There was virtually no food ready, only orange chicken and Shanghai Angus Steak. We were ordering for 4, and were told the wait on mushroom chicken would be about 15 minutes, while others would be 5 minutes, we ordered knowing a wait would be involved, but figuring on maybe 20 or so minutes. A handful of customers came in after us and ordered, while we stood back and waited, and despite ordering some of the same things we had, were served ahead of us. After 4 or 5 people had gone by we noticed that everything we had ordered was available, so we asked if our orders had been finished. The young man behind the counter gave us a rather curt negative. He began hastily puting our orders together, managing to forget one of them altogether. We each paid for our order in turn, however, when It came time for the fourth co-worker's order, there was no food in his to-go container, and what he had ordered was again in short supply because other people had ordered it and been served ahead of him. Without acknowledging that his food hadn't been prepared yet, the young man turned to my co-worker and offered to get him billed out. My co-worker simply asked "is it finished yet?" The man replied that it was not, and my co-worker said, rather angrily "Just forget it then, our lunch break is about up as it is, and we turned and walked out...45 minutes after we had initially arrived. There was no apology given for the massive wait, no offer to make any kind of amends for the inconvenience. Turned my opinion on this Panda Express from one of optimism, to a sheer negative, will...

I usually don't leave reviews but this service was so bad I have to point it out.

I ordered for pickup at ~7:45 to pick up at 8:15. I show up at 8:30 and ask for my order. The woman at the counter says only says she needs my confirmation number so I go grab my phone from my car.

I walk to the door and another employee locks the door in front of me. Then another customer walks up and tries to enter, he said he's been waiting for 15 minutes in his car for them and now can't enter either. We're both dumb founded at how disrespectful this interaction just was.

I will say this was after the lobby closed at around 8:35. I wouldn't have found it so rude if the employee asked me to pull up to the window or literally anything else.

I pull up to the drive thru window and wait for 3 minutes before I lay on my horn to get any one to even acknowledge me. An employee comes up and tells me it's a 2 minute wait until kung pao chicken, i explain i ordered for pickup for 25 minutes ago and she says "yeah it was busy" (apparently they didn't need the order number?) and offers to replace the the food with something else. I say I'll wait the 2 minutes. About 3 minutes later I get told to pull up and they'll bring the food out.

I then sat in my car for an additional 7 minutes watching 2 employees open and close the same box over 15 times. At 8:45, 1 hour after I ordered, i received my order.

Literally any communication could have prevented this whole thing. The food was bad as expected and i will never eat here again.

Try china star...

Ordered online with the guarantee that my order would be ready at my desired pick up time. I get to the restaurant, doors are locked, signs posted on the door saying that the dining room is closed for that week. Yeah, okay, not surprised because of COVID. I call the restaurant, and right off the bat, the gal who answers the phone after letting it ring for a solid fifty seconds starts questioning me “if I can read properly”. She assumed because there were signs posted that I couldn’t comprehend what they meant. I told her I ordered online and wanted to pick up the meals. She told me I had to wait in the drive thru. Now, this normally wouldn’t be a problem, but this was 5:30p on a Thursday. The line was 19 cars deep, bleeding into the street and impeding traffic. She told me there was no other way to give me my food to limit contact. I ended up just leaving because $23.45 is far beyond not worth waiting for a half hour. I’ll eat at Panda Express again in the future, because their food is very good, but this was a pretty...