Si Chuan Dou Hua Restaurant

Had relatives' lunch gathering at the restaurant on Sunday. What a major TOTAL disappointment for every one of us, twelve of us to be exact. Our virgin time there proved to be our final time too.

We should have heed the ratings and reviews on HungryGoWhere.com. It is bad, utterly bad. With less than 50% positive ratings and reviews. We wanna play nice and gave them a chance to prove us wrong, in which they failed to do so.

The table which we sat at. Initial impression was that it was really cramped, especially at my side, which is faced against the wall. Should I need to use the washroom, at least four people have to move aside. Oh gawd. Why got such poor table layouts? >:(

The view from the room behind us. Not from our table definitely. We thought that despite the bad reviews online, we will just take it with a pinch of salt and perhaps enjoy the 'beautiful' scenery, or so that's what my aunt thought.

Okay, so their way of pouring the water into the cup with tea leaves already present was quite 'unique' in some sense hur? Haha. But my all relatives of my parents' generation were complaining about it. WHY? Because the water wasn't HOT at all. Which makes the tea less enjoyable and the aroma of the tea can hardly even be tasted. Gosh.

Okay, pictures of some dishes. Could not be bothered to take all the dishes, probably because I am suffering from one of the dishes, it was so awful I nearly died.

Okay, here are some my comments. Firstly, the xiaolongbao I felt was average only, I would prefer Din Tai Feng's version any time. The rest of the dishes were soso. Not that they're exceptionally good that I actually remembered. But the one at the bottom right, that one was the ultimate bad to my liking. It's supposed to be some sort of dish with fish. It was spicy, weird kind. Then I took a slice of the fish and ate it. While chewing, I chewed upon something, it was HORRIBLE. I had no idea what was that! It seemed like a chili seed but much much worse. It's like wasabi mixed with all sorts of things. So disgusting that I drank lots of water and only took one mouthful. :/

Sigh, the dirty tables and plates after countless dishes and no effort was made to change our plates.

:( :( :(

This is the first time I have experienced such bad service at a restaurant. I've sent them a feedback, well hope they will make some improvements. Click to read about it.

From the lengthy feedback I wrote.

Firstly, the waiters and waitresses were simply not well-trained. We requested for a few glasses of warm and iced water, but we had to constantly remind them for at least FIVE times. They all looked like they are in their twenties or thirties and yet their memory were comparable to an 80 years old suffering from dementia. How hard is it to serve us a few glasses of water? Though we had a table of twelve, only a few of us requested for water alongside the tea. We would gladly even pay for the glass of water, but the service was just horrendous and unacceptable. We even have to wait like 15 minutes or more each time we asked them to refill our glasses or to request for a new glass. Not that I'm being extremely difficult, but being in the service industry, their behaviours were a disgrace. I raised my hand up in the air and refused to put it down till someone attends to me. To my horror and anger, a waiter saw me and we made eye contact, but he actually TURNED away and pretended not to see my raised hand high up in the air. At times, my aunt was so boiling with anger that she even went straight up to the waitress to request her for the glasses of water which they CONVENIENTLY forgot. We paid for the service charge and we expected to be served with the minimal service. The service was so utterly slow that my aunt had to even be the waitress HERSELF, and served us the dish from the big bowl. The waiter came by to serve another dish and did not even bother to assist my aunt in distributing the portions. What a disappointment.

Secondly, when we asked the waitress to recommend us some dishes, she cannot even recommend ANY. She said all are good. This is such a model answer and as a customer, sometimes I want to try the signature dishes first. Also, when we showed them pictures of the dishes that we saw online, they do not know what it is, which is evident that they lack the knowledge. We had to WAIT yet again for them to ask another staff for clarifications. This is really unprofessional. Please train your staffs in the menu knowledge.

Thirdly, we had quite alot of dishes but there was no initiative to change our plates, which was already dirtied with sauces from many previous dishes. My aunt, she was really pissed off and had to request them to change. Of course, better restaurants we ate at would change the plates upon every dish but since the customer service was so bad here, I didn't expect it to be this bad. If we didn't request, we would probably end up with unsightly plates at the end of lunch. Don't you know that a clean plate sometimes can improve the customer satisfaction in terms of tasting the food properly and not from the leftovers from the previous dishes.

I hope your management can better train your staffs in the service industry. They REPRESENT your company and they deal directly with the customers. Having experienced such bad customer service certainly deters us from ever coming back again and your staffs' attitude were really evidently bad. The food wasn't exactly superb or good, but the horrible customer service made the entire experience even worse. And dissatisfied customers definitely will not spread good about the restaurant, which does not do the company any good...

Yawns. What a waste of time and money. They would probably just ignore the feedback hur, or even delete it to prevent the top management from seeing it. Oh well, not my problem.