BENTO Downtown Orlando — Restaurant in Orlando

TL;DR: A lesson in how NOT to change your business model. Decent food and decent service has soured into not good food and somehow both terrible and non-existent service. Go to Nifty's next door unless you absolutely have to have bad egg rolls, 7-11 has those.

I'd gone here occasionally for the past 5 or 6 years and while the service was never outstanding and the food was never better than one would expect of an Americanized Japanese bento restaurant it was never bad. Apparently the rise of services like Ubereats and GrubHub have changed that in they no longer feel they need to try.

I went in today for the first time in a couple months and was immediately struck by how empty it is. At the same time of day that previously there was a line out the door less than a quarter of the tables had anyone seated. Previously you would wait to be seated and no signage seemed to indicate any differently. As previously there are two lines when you enter, one for take out and one for seating. We stood at the line for seating for a moment and someone in the kitchen told us that they'd be right with us. Okay, a minute passes, two minutes, not long in itself but long enough to notice the large number of staff just standing around feet from us talking to each other. Eventually one of them turns around and, in a very rude tone, says "Can I help you?". We say we were waiting to be seated. The person rolls their eyes and says "You seat yourself.". This is fine but it is a change in their policy and nothing was indicating that. We were clearly not the only ones confused by this as the person behind us was telling her elderly mother about the restaurant and explaining it was a sit down place with waiters and such. She looked just as confused as I felt about the person's rude tone to relay this new policy. After we sat at our table for 10 minutes we realized that wasn't the only change. The entire restaurant has converted to little more than a Chiense take-out place a with a large dining room but there is nothing to indicate the change and no staff will inform you of it. Simply coming over to our table or one of the other three parties who had found their seat at the same time and were also looking confused that we needed to go to the counter to order would have been nice but that did not occur. If you want good Asian food and good service go to the best Korean place in town which is next...

I particularly don't go out to eat Asian food unless there are actually Asians cooking my food. I had gone to China town in Orlando and there are not Chinese, Philippine, Thai, restaurant I have not tried yet around here. Why? Because even thought I can cook Asian food, it won’t be as good as when I get it from those places. I have travel around and I remember overseas the Chinese restaurants were like this incredible buildings that make you feel you were in Asia ...big Pagodas. I went to that place because we had gone to almost all restaurants in Margarita Village; we live 2 miles away from. Now, the food was not as I expected and that was not the problem. What concerned me the most was the guys/gals working there? At the sushi station I saw them working on several orders and never changing their gloves after finishing one and after cleaning the cutting board with a terry towel type? They should be using a red bucked with FDA approve sanitized solution and not using the same towel to clean the cutting board and wipe around. They are counter food service disposable towels and they even come with color code to avoid cross contamination. Another failure I noticed, none were wearing hats, hairnets, beard nets or anything to keep hair to get in to the food and they take your food to the table and they stick their thumb in to the bowl. I mean, come on guys, I never let servers touch the customers place like that, barely the edge when putting on the table but not their fingers inside the bowl. You can use a mini try and grab them by the outside...it is a bowl, you can easily do so. Management needs to improve sanitation techniques and improve the quality of the food. My Rice was under cook and loaded with soy sauce witch made it to be like sticky rice and I wonder if they use the same rice they use for sushi for fry rice. Don't take me wrong please, 90% of customers wont said what I just say and they just tell their friends not go there. Constructive criticism is welcome in the hospitality industry at all times. That is what helps business to improve quality. I hope someone take notes of this and correct it. I’m giving you 3 stars because I know that you guys just opened the place and some of the staff still learning and I have faith that you guys will improve and you’ll make the five first...

I wish there was an option to rate this place 0 stars because I don’t believe it’s worthy of even 1 star! I visited this location on Sunday with my boyfriend and some friends. We all ordered our food and within about 5 minutes everyone’s food started coming out, besides mine. So I wait another 15 mins go by, still waiting, my friend approached the staff to ask what’s going on with my meal, he’s told it’ll only be a few minutes. Another 15 minutes go by, at this point everyone is almost done with their food. And I’m still waiting for mine, so I go ask the staff what’s going on and how much longer it might take. Mind you this whole time they have been filling to go orders and new orders coming in left and right, yet I’m still sitting there 30 minutes later waiting for food! When the food finally arrives we asked the “manager” what took so long and she told us they took so long because they were making fresh noodles and filling to go orders. I take 1 bite into my General Tso chicken and noodle bowl to find cold soggy, excessively oily, bottom of the barrel, probably day old noodles! After making me wait more than 30 minutes for my meal they have the nerve to serve me disgustingly old noodles when this whole time they said the hold up was them making “fresh” noodles. At this point I don’t even have an appetite because of how disgusted I am with their service and the quality of the food. I approached the staff to voice my concerns and was met with attitude from both the guy rolling sushi at the time and the “manager”. I asked for a refund which they provided with a side of attitude of course. What she should have really done is taken care of the whole bill to compensate for their horrible service. There was no concern, no apology, no explanation, no effort to make things right. The “manager” was so annoyed to even be bothered with this issue. And I put the word “manager” in quotations because she may have held the title but she was far from what a true manager embodies. I would strongly suggest re training her along with your entire staff on what hospitality is.

Please do yourself a favor and don’t waste time or your...