Underwhelmed

I was pretty excited to try Gingko reading the great reviews, since it's in my newly adopted neighborhood. Unfortunately, Gingko was underwhelming.

You know when you go to a place and they charge you for your booze and they charge separately for the mixer and hope you won't notice? That's Gingko. It goes downhill from there. Skimpy portions on the beef kebab - only one! It came with a giant pile of greasy soft fries, not good, couldn't finish (although the beef kebab was every bit as good as you'd get from your local street vendor, albeit at 6 times the price). Hard to screw up Stella.

WiFi... it's free. Except it doesn't work, unless you're using fuwuyuan's shanzhai iPhone clone which apparently worked perfectly. I had literally two WiFi capable mobile phones and a netbook and nothing connected... the guy just kept slowly reading "WINDOWS is unable to connect to the network." Clearly must be a problem with my netbook, my phone, and also the other phone, nothing wrong at all with the WiFi, slow, tentative and polite stare with no effort to resolve the problem. Meiyou.

Service is either hyper-attentive (expecting your order instantly immediately after delivering the menu) or nonexistent. There was a soccer game on, so I suppose the staff can be excused from doing their jobs.

Finally, the non-smoking area is not enforced. Nothing more frustrating than a restaurant with non smoking (which I greatly prefer) only to find that I'll return home reeking of tobacco smoke.

It seems like this place may have been opened by a foreigner, and reverted to Chinese staff and management. The menu is much less complex than it once was (based on the reviews), just burgers, sandwiches, pizza and a few overpriced soups. The prices aren't bad, but they aren't good either. This close to NLGX, there are much better options.