Kitchen Cray ATL Restaurant — Restaurant in Sandy Springs

Brief: This restaurant is a grab bag of good, bad and meh that lands it a mediocre review. A shame, because if they fixed a few key areas then it could definitely end up being a 5-star.

The -complete- Farsi Kitchen Persian Restaurant Review! Sections: Good, Bad, Other comments, and Final Thoughts.

What Farsi does WELL: The primary goal of any restaurant is to hire a good chef, serve good tasting food. Farsi definitely checks those boxes. I don't know who they have in the back but they are amazing! Everything was cooked to perfection. Seasonings were great! Farsi also has nice, well-trained staff. My server Alexa was pretty new but did a decent job. I felt like I was mostly well taken care of... mostly. The hardest worker in the restaurant was a young guy named Martin. He was constantly going around and busting tables. Impressive worker who could get a job at any restaurant in Atlanta if he wanted. -My chicken was moist and perfect. -kubideh was cooked well Labneh was great! -salad was small but tasted great -one nice surprise were the diced onions that came with the main dish.

What Farsi does BAD: It is a shame that with such a good chef, the restaurant kinda fails in some areas. The appetisers that require bread: Labneh (which tastes great), humus, kakebademajune (sp?) come with such little bread that you only finish half of your dip. Right as soon as my table was complaining about needing more bread, the table right next to mine made the same complaint to their server. If you want more bread they try to charge you $1.50. The restaurant creates a problem then tries to sell you the solution...not cool. The restaurant doesn't give you complimentary Sabsi (complimentary bread, and dish of veggies/herbs), it isn't even on the menu. The price of the dishes is about 3-5 dollars less than others, so if you are gluten free or don't want Sabsi, then this is a good deal. Salad portions are very small and they charge you $8 :( tea was dissapointing. On the positive you get honey with it, free refills (as I would expect), and they give you cubed sugar (but not the brown sugar). On the negative it wasn't steeped for long enough, weak flavor. They don't leave the pot with you so if service is slow it may take a while to get refills. They don't have shallot Yogurt "Mast-O Musir". I don't expect every restaurant to have everything. This however, is a favorite. Desserts are overpriced. The baklava wasn't very good so that was a dissapointment :( Every time the main door entered, people sitting near the entrance (and even back a bit) got hit with a wave of cold air. They should really do something about this.

Meh "other comments": There were some little things that were just odd and should be fixed. -one of the 8 or so lights above the bar was different from the others...they could easily replace this. -One of the paintings on the wall was noticably crooked...attention to details. -The managers were wearing button-up shirts, servers were all in black, but poor Martin was wearing just like...regular clothes. They should help him out with a uniform or nicer clothing. I understand he is a "busboy" but he worked hard and should look professional in such a nice restaurant. Also, lose the backwards baseball hat. -While it was nice that the plates were shaped to match the kubideh and basic skewers: unfortunately rice was spilling off of them. It was...

I recently visited Kitchen Kray in ATL to celebrate a birthday, and unfortunately, it was far from the enjoyable experience we were hoping for.

To start, it took 26 minutes for my friend first and only drink to arrive, and I didn’t get mine until 42 minutes after ordering. The service was chaotic, with two different waiters attending to our table, and it seemed like the staff was confused about who was responsible for which tables, even though there were only 3 other parties dining at the time. The waiter brought only one set of utensils and two napkin for our party.

For our appetizer, we ordered lemon pepper wings, but they were nothing like we expected—there was no lemon pepper flavor at all, just garnishes on top. When we inquired about it, other menu items the waiter mentioned they were out of crab since Friday. For reference, we went today which is a Sunday.

For the main course, my friend ordered the fish and grits, but the fish batter was so salty that she had to peel it off to eat it which she ended up just throwing in the towel and not eating it. A worker who didn’t identify herself came over and asked how everything was. When we told her about the issues, with the food and time frame on drinks and food arrivals she made an odd comment about a batter mix sold by "Mr. Make It Happen," which left us confused and still unsure about the point of her statement.

I also ordered a burger came with 3 tomatoes 2 slices of back one piece of lettuce and cheese. No mayo mustard, and asked for condiments, the waiter said she would check and never returned to the table. We began stacking our plates of unfinished food to leave, the busboy came to grab them, and we had to ask him for the ticket because our waiter was nowhere to be found. The waiter then spoke from across the room saying she would be there in a minute and arrived 5 mins later. When came over and just presented the final amount on the payment device without offering a chance to review the receipt. We assume that because gratuity was automatically added, the staff felt they didn’t need to provide good service, but it was still frustrating. We were their to celebrate and order more beverages but decided to go to another location due to the poor service from beginning to end.

Overall, the food and service were underwhelming. The vibe of the place felt flat, and you could hear every conversation happening around you. Given how slow the service was and the poor food quality, we won’t be returning anytime soon. Hopefully, they can take this feedback and improve the experience for others...

Horrible experience with family. The wait staff they have is not at all experienced in how to deal with customers. They lack the knowledge of the items on the menu. As soon as we got seated, the waitress didn’t pay attention and dropped water on the table due to her holding an overfilled jug. We gave the order for appetizers and it took an hour to get 2 appetizers. Yes, 1 hour just for appetizers. After the appetizer arrived, they didn’t seem to be fresh. We also gave our dinner order and then it took well over 1 hour and 15 mins to get our dinner. We were almost about to pay the cheque for the appetizer and leave because of the extremely slow service until the server confirmed to us that our food is being plated. When the food came out, the waitress made an error with two orders that they had to fix and overall the food didn’t seem fresh. The saffron rice were reheated, the koobideh Kabab were also reheated. It didn’t seem fresh at all.

Overall, it was a very poor and below average from my expectations. The family sitting across from my table seemed liked they had been waiting for a while for their food and as soon as the food arrived they walked out of the restaurant and they had taken too long.

The owner or manager needs to hire more experienced staff who knows the cuisine and how to handle the customers. The inexperienced staff will need to be trained well or they will only make it worse for customers who will be out of patience.

For what you are paying for, It’s better to spend this money on another Persian restaurant where you can get both food and most importantly service...