This won’t be a food review per se, but it IS about a restaurant – one that I frequent, actually.

People who know me will know that I like having dimsum at this place called Yuan Le in Bandar Puteri Puchong. I’ve been eating there since they were first known as Taiji Eatery, and I’ve always stuck with them in spite of friends and family preferring other joints nearby like Foo Hing.

Now; I have no complaints about the breakfast service at Yuan Le, because I drop by at least once a month for dumplings. The food is decent and reasonably priced, and I don’t have to wait a whole hour like I have to do at Foo Hing.

The dinner service, however…

So the restaurant recently introduced night service, serving not only dimsum but also stir fried rice dishes and hotpot. The fam and I saw their advertisement while having breakfast one day, and decided to come back at night to try the hotpot because it seemed reasonably priced.

The resto was close to empty even though it was a Saturday night. We placed our orders at 7PM. And waited.

For 45 minutes. 

Two other tables ordering dimsum and rice had their food, finished, and left.

We were left confused, because isn’t hotpot something you should have readily available? You don’t even have to cook it! It’s only a matter of plating up the ingredients. I called a waitress and she said that they were boiling the soup because they didn’t have it ready like in regular hotpot restos (?). Okay, so we waited. The soup came at the 35 minute mark, they placed it on an electric stove and went off.

We then continued waiting.

And waiting.

The soup wasn’t boiling.

Nobody came to check on us or even offer to ask if we wanted to order some dimsum while waiting. All the waiters/workers were sat on their ass at the back of the resto, the manager was sat on her ass behind the counter, and when my mom approached her and told her we had been waiting long, she glanced up, said “Oh, its like that. It takes a long time,” then went back to pressing her phone.

?????

Wow some kind of shitty ass service you have there. You can’t even look at customers when you talk to them. If your only job is to take money at the cashier, don’t call yourself the manager. You can’t even handle one customer with proper service. 

After 10 minutes, I got up and talked to her. In the same nonchalant tone, she said “oh, they need time to defrost the ingredients.”

?????

So if a customer comes in, then you defrost the ingredients? At least microwave them to defrost. If they take an hour to thaw, you expect customers, in an empty resto, mind you, to wait for an hour?

I don’t even work in customer service, and I know that at this point, you should at least go to the kitchen and tell them to hustle. Nope. Sat on her ass at the counter and didn’t dare look at me. You are one stupid excuse of a ‘boss’.

Guess what happened after?

After 10 minutes of waiting, the soup wouldn’t boil because they had a faulty electric stove, the frosted ingredients (yes they still had layers of ice over them) came and we couldn’t cook because the stove wasn’t working. The workers hurriedly tried to replace a new one but at this point we were so hungry and fed up my mom just stood up and walked off.

At no point did the ‘manager’ do anything. 

Look, if you can’t handle dinner service, then for fuck’s sake, stick to your dimsum menu and don’t offer anything else. Also, you need to seriously relook your customer service, because this is not how you treat paying customers. We were not rude when we inquired about the status of our food, and your shitty-ass attitude is unjustifiable. Is it because the big boss isn’t around (he usually is in the morning, and will hustle things up if he sees a table not being served) that you guys think it’s okay to muck about?

In the end we walked to a restaurant across the road and had dinner there instead. Congrats on losing business for the night.

After this incident, I am seriously considering to look for another dimsum place to frequent. It wasn’t just about the slow service but the manner in which it was handled and the “Idk wtf I’m doing so I’ll just act like I don’t care” attitude served up by the ‘manager’.

Maybe to you it will just be one customer lost and not a big deal, but a word of advice if you wanna continue your business, because word gets around – IMPROVE YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE.