Huge Tree Pastry — Restaurant in Monterey Park

I very rarely write reviews to begin with and this may be my very first 1-star review in my 32 years of life, but that just highlights how upset this experience made me.

To preface everything, I am a Taiwanese American vegetarian who loves the kind of food that Huge Tree offers. I am from San Jose, but I make it a point to come to Huge Tree for my Taiwanese breakfast fix whenever I'm in the area. However, this may end after today.

I called in a take-out order for 6 fan tuans, 2 salty soymilks, and 2 you tiaos (totaling $70.50) and drove 25m one-way from Arcadia to pick up my order and took it home to share with my family. I set everything up and discovered that the salty soymilks were actually sweet soymilks. "OK, that's fine, everyone makes mistakes. I'll just tell them about the mixup and ask to swap the sweet soymilk for salty ones." I'm annoyed that I'll have to drive back to fix my order, but fine, I'll take it as a lesson to check my order before leaving next time.

However, when I called the lady owner and explained the situation, she first deflects responsibility by saying that "salty" and "sweet" sound similar in Chinese and claimed that it's both of our faults that this miscommunication happened. That's not true... I definitely said "salty" and if she misheard that as "sweet", that's her issue. Also, I'm pretty sure she repeated the order back to me afterwards and confirmed 2 salty soymilks.

Alright, fine, I don't really care why this mistake happened. I just want to get my order fixed. When I tell her that I want to come back and switch the soymilks, she says that the salty soymilk is $1.75 more expensive than the sweet soymilk and asked me to pay the difference of $3.50 for the two salty soymilk swaps. At this point, I'm starting to get mad because if a restaurant messes up my order and I bring back the untouched food (just to prove I'm not trying to take advantage and get free food), I feel like the business should comp that small difference to apologize for the mistake. Not only do I have to waste 50 minutes of time and gas for a second round-trip drive in 100 degree heat (check temp records for Monterey Park on 8/20/24), I have to pay the $3.50 difference for Huge Tree's mistake.

This is now a matter of principle, not money. When I was growing up, my parents always taught me to be proud of my Taiwanese heritage and that Taiwanese people are honest and upright, so I should strive to uphold this reputation. However, today, Huge Tree's elderly Taiwanese owners proved that not all Taiwanese people are honest and I am ashamed for them. If they weren't so shameless, I would not be writing such a scathing review over just $3.50. They are already cash-only, which allows them to save unknown amounts of tax money by misreporting to the IRS, but also don't treat their customers with basic respect. Despite my love for Taiwanese breakfast foods, I would not mind if this place closed down. I will look elsewhere for my Taiwanese breakfast fix.

@Huge Tree owners,...

NOT recommended for these reasons: bad food, overpriced, rude service, cash only, to-go only, awful environment, and not handicap friendly. Closed on Wednesday and major Chinese holidays.

I don't get the recent high rating as the negative comments are all true. Plus, this place is also not handicap friendly at all. I was just badly injured, not handicap, and I felt there's no room for me. Can't imagine how a handicap person can come order in this setting.

Came here to explore alternative Taiwanese breakfast spot in the neighborhood based on Google reviews and I feel cheated... For a cash only place the price is totally overpriced.

The entrance is still barricaded (aka to-go only), so it'll look busy with just three customers, because everyone is standing around the entrance, which doesn't have much room. Very disorganized layout. Makes no sense now that the pandemic restriction has been lifted for almost a year.

Although its health inspection rating is A the outside environment is parking lot and narrow walkway, and not that clean... The main reason is that the food is bad.

Not only it's overpriced (especially for a cash only place!) Honestly I keep coming to Taiwanese breakfast place for sentimental reason. This place can't even get the basic fried donut sticks and rice ball right! I can taste the oil is super-overly-used oil, which makes me question the A rating. The rice ball literally has only the fried donut and nothing else.... No wonder the menu has an option to add ingredients. But that makes the price ridiculously high. The soy milk is diluted... I ended up going back to my usual spot for a decent breakfast.

If this is how the food is on a regular weekend, which I suspect is the high point of their business, I can't imagine what's it like on 'regular' days... Perhaps this is the best they can serve.

Since I spent double the money for what I want, I just want to share one exact same item (the famous rice ball) to show the food portion in this place.... It's not only 1/5 smaller but also absolutely tasteless with bad ingredients. I won't come back.

P.S. this is my third visit -- this first time was closed due to Chinese holidays, and 2nd time was on a Wednesday. There's no warning for the closing on...

Okay, definitely not the cleanest place on Earth, but they have the Taiwanese goods that I like and miss! Came here on a Sunday around 2PM, and to my surprise, there was a line. It wasn't long, but waited for about 20 minutes before getting seated.

I was very excited to try this place since I love Taiwanese breakfast, and this place seems to be popular according to Yelp. Thus, I decided to have my second lunch of the day here during my food binge week in LA.

Sweet Soy Milk THIS IS THE REAL THING. Not those nasty, powdery soy milk you find at other restaurants, but real soy milk from real soy beans. You can definitely taste the difference. It was perfectly sweetened and refreshing.

Sweet Tofu Pudding Silky smooth tofu pudding - I've never had tofu pudding this smooth before. Like the sweet soy milk, this is not made from powder. It literally just melts in your mouth. Though, I was disappointed that they ran out of cold sweet tofu, so I had to get it warm, which isn't as good.

Green Onion Pancake I could pass on this next time. This isn't like the flaky, chewy kind like the ones from Taiwan. However, it had nice fragrant from the green onions.

Chitterling Noodle My bf is really picky with his Chitterling Noodles, and compares each one with "Ay Chung" in Taiwan. Skeptical, he actually enjoyed this. While it wasn't the "real thing", it was still satisfying.

Overall, might come back next time for their rice rolls. I was too stuffed this time to order it.. But warning - it seems like Huge Tree Pastry premake a lot of their food and just microwaves it prior to serving it.. which I'm not a big fan of. So I would only order food that cannot be easily microwaveable... Also, the bread that are sitting on the table near the front had flies flying all over them, so I wouldn't order...