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2013-02-24
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This restaurant was so comically bad, it inspired me to sign up for an Open Rice account just so I can write candidly to warn others about it. If you like to pay about $500 per person to have dinner plates literally snatched out from under you while you're eating, dirty dining utensils carelessly and noisily poured into your lap and your purse, and wait staff hovering around you like low-flying UFOs trying to chase you away from your seat to make room for others, then boy, have you found the r
This restaurant was so comically bad, it inspired me to sign up for an Open Rice account just so I can write candidly to warn others about it. If you like to pay about $500 per person to have dinner plates literally snatched out from under you while you're eating, dirty dining utensils carelessly and noisily poured into your lap and your purse, and wait staff hovering around you like low-flying UFOs trying to chase you away from your seat to make room for others, then boy, have you found the right restaurant! Personally, I wouldn’t go back there unless every other restaurant in HK has been burnt to the ground or the end of the world, whichever comes first.
I've been to Mango Tree twice since it opened--once in the second half of 2012, and once today. While the food there is pretty good (as all the previous rave reviews must attest), I've previously been prevented from going there for gatherings because (1) I'm a rice fiend and (2) this place has one of the most outrageously expensive white rice in HK--nay, probably in all Asia. While the dishes themselves are pretty reasonably priced, the bowls of white rice seem to be priced as if they were dipped in gold and sprinkled with diamond dust. But I digress. That's not why I'm writing this bad review.
Anyway, today three friends and I decided to go for some Thai food, and made a reservation for the 6:30 seating at Mango Tree (one friend was craving for their curry crab dish so the rest of us caved). We were told that we'd have to wrap up dinner by 8 because that's when the second seating comes, and we figured 1 hour and a half is plenty of time to order and eat provided that the wait staff were efficient. We got to the restaurant at 6:30pm, and were seated after five minutes.
We asked for four coconuts, and although the waitress nodded enthusiastically and walked toward the kitchen as if she was going to fulfill our order, neither she nor the coconuts showed up ever again. I assumed they both disappeared into the Twilight Zone. We sent another waitress to chase after the first waitress, only to be told that the order hasn't been placed yet. That was weird. But anyway, by that point we've put in our food orders and the dishes were arriving with regularity, so we tucked ourselves in for the feeding frenzy.
The dining room started filling up by that time, so we found that (1) if you want to get the attention of one of the wait staff, you’d have to stand up and wave your arms around like an air traffic controller in order to be noticed; this may be because our table was tucked into a window recess, but still, vaguely disruptive to the dining process, even if I did get a good workout from that; and (2) the wait staff doesn’t seem to exactly speak English, because even though they appear to understand everything we said to them and walked off energetically with every apparent intent to carry out our order, most of them just never returned with the right things we asked for, be it chopsticks, clean dishes, fried rice orders…an unnecessary amount of time was wasted in our waiting for wait staff to serve us and repeating our orders after we realized that our orders weren’t understood, despite all appearances to the contrary.
Then, the comically bad happened. A member of the wait staff (she seemed very forbidding, like a cross between a maitre d’ at an outrageously expensive hotel and your Catholic high school English teacher who hates you personally) came up to me and asked me in a rather accusatory tone what dessert I’d like to have. I told her that we’ve previously ordered mango sticky rice. She then said okay, but pointed to the hands of her watch, saying “Now it’s 7:45pm, almost 8, we have to make way for the 8pm guests, so we can only give you one mango sticky rice order.” I was okay with it, because we were pretty full by that time anyway. So she went off. But as soon as she was gone, a swarm of wait staff seemed to descend from heaven and started snatching away our plates with warp speed, without bothering to even ask the perfunctory “are you done with that?” I had to stab at the pineapple rice bowl with my fork in order to stop one of the overly enthusiastic ladies from taking the half-full thing away from me, and friend A, who was sipping on his coconut, had his coconut lifted into the air when one waiter took the mat on which his coconut was resting. Then the friendly maitre d’ came back to our table and started to (purposefully I thought) loudly gathering all the silverware, getting the forks, knives, spoons and chopsticks to fly all over each other like some sort of bad construction accident, with a deafening din to match. We were all mesmerized by the display, but she bore our awed looks with becoming dignity. When she was done, I found a dirty chopstick in my handbag, which was resting on the floor next to my chair….I briefly thought about stealing the chopstick out of spite, but my better nature prevailed and I quietly returned it to the next server passing along.
The one dessert order we were graciously allowed to have arrived at last at the same time as the bill. We were allotted five minutes to eat the thing among the four of us, with two anxious waitresses hovering around us with concern and anxiety the entire time, and the maitre d’ shooting poisonous daggers at us across the room the entire time. We ran away from the restaurant at exactly two minutes to 8, ahead of schedule! Amazing escape!
The bill came out to around HK$1,800 for four ppl. Definitely not bad in terms of price, but I imagine the quality of service is likely to please even the most intense of masochists.
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