8/8/08- What we encountered here was a scene that resembled a train wreck in the twilight zone. As a customer in a restaurant, it is truly a surreal experience to have the wait staff intentionally ignore you. At first you ask yourself why and try to make excuses, but when you notice that the restaurant is at 25% capacity, you realize that the most painful answer is inevitably the most likely: they just don't care. We arrived at the restaurant around 7pm and requested a table for 3. We were told there would be a 20 min wait, even though there was barely anyone in the restaurant (mind you there appeared to be at least a 1:1 ratio of servers to customers). So we sucked it up and went to the bar for a cocktail while waiting for one of the 50 open tables to become available. Now the fun begins- ordering drinks. Does an extra dirty Grey Goose martini with a twist of grape sound good to you? Well then, make sure you tell the slow-as-molasses bartender at Pearl of the Orient to make sure she WASHES OUT THE MARTINI SHAKER after each use! We would have reordered the drinks, but they took so long to get that we didn't want to push our already bad luck. Finally we were seated at a table and then had to wait, I kid you not, another 45 minutes before the server actually came to us. During our wait, what seemed to be the manager aka Mr. Asian Smiley Face made an appearance at the table to flash his non-pearly whites through an ear-to-ear smile and tried his hardest in broken english to tell us that our server would be with us shortly. Finally just before 9pm a server arrived, and she actually asked us if we were ready to order. After analyzing the situation we decided it would be best not to eat the food there, as the kitchen must surely be a health code nightmare directly proportionate in severity to the terrible quality of service. So we lied and told the server that we had a movie to catch and I finished my Ichiban beer and we left.
Cons: Staff will not wait on you, do they even serve food?
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