We went here this past weekend, during their "soft opening." Has anyone noticed that in China "soft opening" seems to mean "everyone's welcome, but we can not have half the stuff on our menu and you aren't allowed to care; nor are we allowed to tell you all at once what we don't have, but only one thing at a time, at different times, and long after you ordered them."?
So, the general atmosphere was nice, and the staff were attentive. They're still learning the ropes, obviously. As I implied above, two of the things we ordered were not available. That was fine, but the staff couldn't tell us until we'd already placed the order and they'd left; nor could they tell us both things at once. We had them running back and forth from our table like the proverbial headless chickens, letting us know what we could and couldn't order. There were also too many of them doing too many different things. So, for example, at one point we had one lady trying to place a dish in our table while we were still eating the previous one, while a young man was shoving my friend's change in her face while she had her arm outstretched to the dip in the middle of the table. That kind of thing needs some work, and will hopefully improve over time. The paying before you eat is fine–but it did make for a lot of running back and forth, made it hard to order an extra thing after your main order, and had us checking the bill and getting change shoved at us when we would have liked to be eating.
We decided to taste as many things as we could, to get an idea of the place. So we ordered and all shared a hot dog, a bagel sandwich, a salad, some smoothies, coffee, spicy potato wedges and a dessert. The salad was excellent. It was presented well, it was a good size, it was filling and the greens were varied and clean. Well done. The spicy potato wedges were also very, very good. They were hot, there were plenty of them, they were spiced just right and the sauce choices at the sauce bar were pretty good. We enjoyed the wedges very much.
The hot dog and bagel sandwich were a mixed bag. On the plus side, the meats themselves were absolutely amazing. Clearly not local junk–made fresh from high quality meat. You could really taste the difference and we were extremely pleased. As another plus, the toppings went well with the meats.
On the negative, there was so much sauce and dressing on our "bagelwich" and hot dog that they were hard to eat. All 3 of us agreed that it was messy and annoying to try to get through. It spilled all over everything, almost overwhelmed the flavor of the meat, completely soaked the breads and made them pretty useless for holding the sandwiches, and about 1/3 of it just ended up being scraped off so we could get at the good stuff underneath. The napkins provided were small; we needed wet wipes to clean our hands after that much dripping sauce. Definitely we would recommend they put that stuff on the side so patrons can choose how much they want to add. Also the bagel was not a real bagel. It was a sandwich bagel, or rather a bagel-shaped sandwich bread. It was good with the sandwich, but wouldn't be much by itself as a bagel.
The smoothies were good. You could tell they didn't have sugar and ice cream and stuff added to them. The fruit flavor really came through, and we enjoyed them. The coffee was just ok. Nothing special. The dessert (a chocolate mousse cake) was excellent.
We'll go again, but will probably wait a bit for them to iron out some of the wrinkles. And will definitely ask for sauces on the side.
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