OK Noodle — Restaurant in Milpitas

When it comes to Chinese restaurants, don't expect service, if the food is good, all is well. - Yes, I had firmly believed this, until "OK Noodle" came along. I'd have given them 4 stars based on food only. However, when you factor in the service part, 2-star is extremely generous. It's by far the most horribly run place I've ever been to - by Chinese standard. We went there on Sunday 7/27 for lunch shortly after 12pm. The place was close to 70% full. Here's what happened:

We were informed that they ran out of plates and bowls. We weren't given any utensils either. Meanwhile, 4 other tables remained uncleaned and piled with leftover dishes and plates for the time of our stay. Only tips were removed.

We were seated to a dirty, empty table, with no menus. Later I went to get our own menus.

I saw the table next to us have only one plate and one tea cup for a group of four people. The lady from the table and several guys from other tables finally fed up, they went to the kitchen counter, opened their drawers and got themselves tea cups, chopsticks and paper napkins, very resourceful people.

When our dish came out, there's still no plates on the table and nothing to eat with. The waitress said she'd be back and left us facing a dish that we couldn't eat. She didn't come back. Finally we saw on the kitchen counter a stack of seemingly clean wet plates and just ran to grab them. Sadly we never got any spoons.

One table had their order missing. Another table was given the wrong thing but so grateful for any food at that point that they accepted it happily. Then I heard one of the two waitresses shouting to the kitchen that some table's order was somehow written twice on separate bills. The waitress had buried her head in the orders for so long doing nothing else, I thought she finally had them all figured out, apparently not so.

There's no A/C, no fan. Outside was probably 90F, it's a hot day.

After more than 40 min. our first dish came. When we did get the utensils to eat it, It was delicious, partly because we were so hungry. Then it's quickly done and we waited for the second dish. Eventually we cancelled two dishes that just seemed hopeless to come to us. I might have waited longer if I hadn't been worried about passing out in the suffocating place. It's so hot that my 5-year-old son had finished a big glass of ice water and I didn't believe we'd get refill.

Here's my advice if you decide to brave the place: Go when there's no or very few customers. They can probably manage one table on a dead night, but not many more than that.

Otherwise: Keep expectation low, don't assume you'll see all the food you've ordered. Be a survivor and fetch your own utensils and napkins. Don't expect any difference between "not spicy", "mild", "spicy". I ordered a dish with no chili pepper sign which turned out to be very spicy, dripping in hot sauce. Go when you are not hungry and can wait.

If you decide to order to go, make sure you check what you get. We ordered the big plate lamb with noodle over the phone once before and they didn't give us the noodle. That incidence prompted us to eat there just to be sure.

Other than that, the food is good, typical northern style food, good noodles, when they manage to...

I’ve doordashed from here at least twice and finally stopped by to pick up to-go last week and noticed how quiet the restaurant was on a Thursday night. There was literally no one there, and I’m wondering why? The noodles here are great! I personally love what they have to offer and the price is quite fair. $9.80 for a big bowl of braised noodle soup. If you order sides like I do, you will not finish the noodles or will be quite full if you do finish. I normally order the braised beef noodle soup and I love the chewiness of the noodles, and the soup broth is super tasty (though a tad oily). The appetizer I love here is the liang pi. It’s very well done and taste is on point! I love the noodles they use. I also really enjoy the crispy black fungus. Again they make that very well and it’s hard to make it taste good without being too soft. I almost feel like this place has become my go-to when I crave a quick bowl of beef soup noodles. Other dish I have ordered was the big plate lamb with noodles and was not too impressed. It was a dry noodle with saute lamb with sauce and veggies on top and you kind of have to toss it to get flavor on the noodles. I didn’t think I had enough to flavor all my noodles and even so, the flavor was too mild for the deliciously thick noodles.

The emptiness of the restaurant scares me a bit, but I do recommend trying the noodles here if you haven’t already because the noodles are...

The biggest thing that this establishment could do to help their customers/help invite more customers in is if they had pictures of the dishes that they're trying to serve. Is it bad that literally every Chinese place I go to is a comparison to Home Eat?! I'm Chinese and have a hard time reading the menu to understand what I'm getting because sometimes the noodles are also different so I appreciate that Home Eat's menu has pictures and that it's so easy to order.

I ended up getting the S1 - Big-Plate Beef Noodles and that's the dish that reminds me so much of my moms cooking aside from the price. My partner got D2 Chili noodles because these two dishes are what we saw everyone else on yelp getting so we had pictures to be able to reference. This was actually my second time here but I didn't remember what I got the first time because I didn't take pictures or review it. The S1 noodles are pretty thick where they're similar to hand pulled noodles but not as bouncy.

Parking: It's located in a strip mall like plaza, but there's usually plenty of parking.

Service: Good. They take your order, serve your food, and you pay at the front.

Return: I wouldn't go out of the way just to come here to eat, but if I'm already in the area and craving...