Shandong Restaurant — Restaurant in Portland

Been going here for years. Seems to be going through some management pains now. Upon arrival, there was literally 15 people standing around the entrance inside. Difficult to even open the door with so many people, and they were all standing around with cell phones up! So, it was obviously multiple delivery drivers waiting on orders. We stood there patiently for a table with about 3 tables being open, their sign says wait to be seated. The owner/manager, or at least the guy running around like nuts was only focused on the to go orders and yelling at each driver. After several minutes of watching this stressful display I was able to stop him for one second, and he said there were no tables available. So we just started to leave and then all of a sudden he stops us and says he has one. The whole experience was hyper and frenetic, and this continued over at our table. He threw the menus down on the table and said "Welcome to Shandong" while he turned away in a huff before we were even seated. The other wait staff were also distracted throughout the entire meal. The first plate came out pretty quickly, but the second plate was another 10 minutes behind it. Sooo, obviously the kitchen and the manager were very overwhelmed by the huge amount of take out orders. The in house service suffered greatly as a result. Other people were trying to flag staff down for drinks and their check. Food was alright, not really great like it used to be. Shandong needs to decide if they want to be a real restaurant or a glorified food cart with a roof. On top of the unpleasant service, a gratuity was automatically added for only 2 people on the bill. Soooo I won't be going back...

Really love their food and the wait staff is great but my god was their ordering system on Christmas was abysmal.

We placed an order at 5pm Christmas Eve for pickup at 6:15 through Shandong’s website. They had a note on the website that holiday orders take 30min to 1hr. No problem, the holidays are busy. They said they’d text us when the order was ready. We never got a text, so we went over around 6:30 to check. It was packed with folks waiting inside and outside for their orders. One woman said she had been there since 5:30 and was just getting her food now.

We tried to call and cancel our order - no one was able to answer the phone likely because they were swamped. There was no clear way to cancel our order using the online ordering service we used.

We returned at 7:15. Still no text. Waited until 8pm before we gave up. We had prepaid so now we have to work with our credit card company or Shandong to get refunded.

The primary issues I saw were: multiple ways to place an order (call in, Grubhub, Uber eats, door dash, and their own online ordering service) as far as I could tell, they had no way of cutting off orders and so when we arrived at 7pm as order #150, people with order #216 were also waiting. the online order system timing was wildly inaccurate. there was no system of figuring out which orders had been called for pickup and not claimed. We have no idea if we missed our order being called and it was just sitting there or if it was just never made.

Mad respect to the staff that had to put up with this system. It must have been a rough night for them. I hope management improves this system...

The reviews raving about the great food and the good size portions and service have to be made by the owners or the staff I would not agree with one good comment made about this restaurant. When I told the server I thought my food had been someone else's leftovers and reused for my dish all she said was I don't know what goes on back there I've worked in Chinese restaurants for years I know that is something that they do the beef in the lo Maine was not only over tenderized but rotten spoiled and the chicken was spoiled in are Kung Pao chicken the lemon chicken was chunks of only breading some had pieces of chicken in it then they charged us $5 for a side of white rice I paid for my food and left. I told the waitress everything I've said here she stood there going huh and clicking her pin then she went back to the kitchen then came gave me are Bill and walked away the service was terrible they came to our table to give us menus and to take the order drop off the food then to see if we wanted take home carriers it was clear we did not eat the majority of our food and give us the bill they never once came back to see if we like the food if we wanted anything else if we'd like to order some more food a drink anything I am extremely disappointed I thought by the look of the pictures it would be fantastic food the reviews say so like they say you can't believe everything you read I hope this helps someone looking for good Chinese food because you won't...