Mount & Bao潇湘阁 — Restaurant in Mill Creek

This place really needs to get it's quality under control. Usually (about 70% of the time) the food is fantastic. However, we've had several takeout orders that were not good, and our most recent order was quite bad. We had two orders of fried rice, and both just tasted off in a way that's difficult to quantify. They were lacking the depth of flavor it usually has (usually the rice has a delicious broth taste to it) and there was something about them that just tasted weird. One order of fried rice had clumps of seasoning that weren't properly mixed. The orange chicken sauce was completely burned, and had a strong bitter taste. We ended up throwing everything out because it was so unpleasant to eat.

The most frustrating part of our most recent experience was that they weren't even busy when we picked up the food. It's not like they didn't have time to remake it properly (which any self-respecting restaurant should do anyways if the food didn't turn out right). Surely they saw and smelled that it didn't turn out right, but they had no problem handing it to us and taking our money for food we couldn't even eat. Maybe the regular chef was out and some random employee tried their best, who knows.

We'll give them another chance, but if the quality is still hit or miss like this, we'll have to find somewhere else to get...

Honestly, the food wasn’t bad, we loved the braised pork belly, but the service was horrible.

The service wasn’t good, so we decided to tip $5.00 on the total bill. The problem is, no one said anything when I paid. But as we were leaving the restaurant, one of the girls in our group went to the restroom. On her way out, she was stopped by one of the employees (a guy with tattoos on his arms) and was pressured to pay more for the tip. It was terrible and really freaked her out, especially since she was alone in the restaurant.

I believe tipping is optional and should depend on the quality of the service, right? But this experience really ruined our day. If there was an issue with the tip, they should have addressed directly with me when I was paying, not by cornering our friend and DEMANDING MORE MONEY FOR TIP.

Hopefully, you can work on your attitude when serving customers, because your food is...

Well, the food was swimming in oil as expected but this place's offering seems excessive. I'm glad to have ordered taken out instead of dining in as I filtered out almost a cup and a half of Sichuan oil floating on top from 4 dishes we ordered. The chang sha noodles were a particular disaster, a salty gooy mess that tastes like ash, no amour of garlic can wash the taste away; the only saving grace was that it was so salty, that you can spit it out immediately without experiencing the remaining horrid. We also ordered the eggplant, cumin lamb and grilled squid dishes, none of them were tolerable as they were so spicy, we could only tolerate a bite or two. None of them were described as spicy but they put so much red chilies in it. We all had Sichuan food before, and know what we should expect. But this place is way over the top, we were happy to throw away...