Eight Tables by George Chen — Restaurant in San Francisco

Decide for yourself what you would rate this experience. This is mine.

I dined here at 8 Tables on 6/17/23 after having planning this dinner for months. I live out of state, and it was important that I made sure we had some plans. I traveled over 2,400 miles to come and enjoy a fun and full day in San Francisco.

I called the restaurant directly on 2/17/23 to make reservations; a gentleman informed me that their electronic books were not open yet for June and that I was a couple weeks early, but he would write me down for my party of two and add the name as soon as they opened. I asked if I would need to confirm these reservations to which he said NO.

Fast forward to 6/16/23 (the day before said reservations) I called to confirm reservations to which I was informed that I had no reservations… a gentleman on the phone came up with a solution, informing me that they in fact had a table of two open for evidently, the original time that I booked. He asked for my name, and a good phone number to add to the list and I had immediately received a confirmation via text. The text message prompted me to click a link, to which I did and that should have been the end of story.

Now it is the day, 6/17/23 and I arrive 25 minutes early and guess what? My name is not in the system and my reservation does not exist. They provide a solution, saying a table is going to leave soon and they can get us sat down in ten minutes. About 30-40 minutes pass and we finally sat down. This months of planning turned out to be a logistical nightmare for the restaurant. I’m really not sure what went wrong here?

The atmosphere and decor was pleasant once we finally sat to enjoy it. It was a warm atmosphere, but yet cool enough to balance out well and with nice decor. Our servers were all very kind and attentive, which consisted of a young lady and gentleman. Excellent front of house service overall.

Everything was running smoothly until our first course, a nine piece tasting menu. There was a long silver hair nestled perfectly in my caviar. I hailed the waiter and he quickly snatched the plate and brought out two additional caviar dishes.

In between and during meals, there was a gentleman who I assume to be the manager pacing up and down the restaurant checking out all the tables and guests. His pacing was distracting and took away from the experience, hearing his feet drag on the ground and feeling him look over constantly. He was a nice gentleman, but should consider being more graceful when managing the dining floor.

Finally, the food: It was a good experience, not life changing, but had a great representation of flavors, spices, ingredients, and presentations of Chinese and other asian dishes. You can tell that a lot of thought, time, and effort gets put into making this food. We left satisfied and not wanting for more. It was perfect, that is, the portions. The hair was a setback, because this is not the chicken and dumplings at Cracker Barrel, or a grand slam at Dennys. You get the idea. The hair should not...

I'll start off with saying, I genuinely don't think this experience is worth the money I don't usually write bad reviews, but this place made me feel like I not only wasted my money, but also the time and effort to get there. I wanna save you the latter.

I came here for my birthday and me and my partners 2 year anniversary. The preparation time was around 2 months. We were asked about our dietary restrictions, assuming so that they could accommodate to our needs, but nothing is done to accommodate at all.

We walk into an unassuming alleyway, up an elevator and into a nice cozy room with the smell of nostalgic burning incense filling your nose. Seated with a warm damp towel and hot tea, your reminded about the dietary restrictions YOU put in place for the table. Then course by course comes out over the next 2 - 3 hours and that's the whole experience. Seems pleasant enough, until the main courses come by and a dish of Rice broth with iberico ham comes out to our VEGETARIAN table. When we reminded the staff about the dietary restrictions in place, they took the item to the back, took off the piece of ham and brought it back with no replacements or accomodations. The next dish on the tasting course is the tea smoked squab. After reminding staff yet again that we are a vegetarian table, they BRING OUT three killed, cooked and uncut squabs for us to SEE then proceed to bring out the prepared dish. My partner was forced to eat it because there were no replacements for the whole dish and he didn't want it to go to waste. We would have lost out on another dish that they did not make any effort into accommodating for.

What's the point in asking for dietary restrictions if they don't use them? They have 2 months to come up with something that we can eat and choose to do nothing.

I would also like to add that our "experience" was almost 4 hours long. We had to wait sometimes 35 minutes in between dishes with nothing in front of us while other tables that came the same time and got the same tasting course as us, finished hours before we did. Little to no table service other than the bare minimum of an hourly water refill and plate cleanup

The audacity to charge us a mandatory $100 tip after that awful experience. Biggest waste of $500 I've ever spent. If a refund were in place I would still be upset that we lost 4 hours of our special day to that.

Very disappointed. I've had better food and service at a burger king. I was looking forward to this for months. Ruined my anniversary...

Beware of inflated taxes, fellow customers!

We were surprised to see on the bill that taxes were charged not just on food and beverages, but also on gratuity and on the SF mandate fee. Since we had never seen this in other places (including quite many high-end restaurants), we thought it was probably a one-off mistake so we asked the waiter if he could double check. We didn't think it was a big deal, and were taken aback by how defensive the waiter suddenly became -- instead of checking on the numbers, the waiter insisted everything was done the way it was supposed to be and he "didn't manipulate anything." What made us even more uncomfortable was that he suddenly raised his voice while talking about these, which is so different from his earlier communications during the night, as if he was trying to make us feel embarrassed and give in. We had no idea where the defensive behavior came from -- we didn't think or suggest it was his mistake; we just thought it was a one-off accounting error that was worth checking. He made us feel that we had to explain ourselves in order for our simple request to be taken seriously, and after that, it took multiple rounds of communications with the waiter and the boss, about half an hour of waiting, and kind help from other customers (who identified the same issue), for this simple mistake to be corrected. We almost gave up because it wasn't worth the hassle, but decided not to because we felt this sort of mistake (intentional or not) should be put to an end. If you consider going to this place, please beware of this and pay close attention to the bill.

This is the main reason why I am giving it one star -- when you pay $700 to celebrate a special occasion with a loved one, the least you would expect is that you are taken seriously if anything goes wrong. But we were hugely disappointed that it wasn't the case. Otherwise, I would give it three and a half based on the following factors.

Food was overall good but not great for the price range -- 6 out of the 9 courses were fine and the other three were mediocre at best (e.g. the chashu beef, and the xiaolongbao). The drinks were also mediocre. Ambience was good. Service was good until we pointed out the inflated tax issue, but was a bit slow -- we ended up spending 3.5 hours on the dinner and 0.5 hour trying to...