• tetris11@lemmy.ml
    70·
    9 days ago

    One of the oldest Chinese restaurants in the UK crams all foreigners upstairs to share tables with random strangers, where cutlery is thrown at you carelessly and the waiter tuts if you don’t give them a string of numbers as an order. If you go there with a chinese national you’re somewhat protected from the abuse, but they still glare at you.

    Anyway the food is divine and they don’t overcharge, and it’s one of my favourite places to eat.

  • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
    272·
    8 days ago

    If the food was great, shouldn’t that fact alone give at least one more star? Why are people so fixated with 1 and 5 stars? Don’t they realize there are three other possibilities to rank? I’m upset.

    • Letstakealook@lemm.ee
      7·
      8 days ago

      The food was good, but they were out of many options, and the service was bad. The owner then responds, telling them to kill themselves. I’d say the one star is for the food. Otherwise, they’d get a zero.

      • Entertainmeonly@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        4·
        8 days ago

        I would like to point out that a one star is technically 0. A five star review on Google is a rating of zero to 4. As a 1 star is automatically a given, one can assess an accurate rating by subtracting 1 from all ratings and understanding it’s a four star system in disguise.

        Google says this restaurant is a 3.2 rating? That’s a 2.2 out of 4 possible stars. The ratio is corrected. Bringing what google says is a 64% down to the actually 55%. This is the manipulation that an automatic 1 star creates.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
    301·
    9 days ago

    A few years ago I was in a local place where the food and service were both entertainingly bad. For decades it had been a wonderful little Greek restaurant, until the couple who ran it moved to Greece for a well-deserved retirement and their son took it over. The son remodeled and reopened it as a combination Greek/sushi restaurant and sports bar, hanging five or six large screens from the ceiling. In a place slightly larger than my living room.

    I was eager to try the sushi. “There’s no sushi tonight. Dennis isn’t here.” Oh, alright, when is Dennis here? “We don’t know. Maybe Wednesday. He never says.” Well alrighty then. Dennis is livin’ the dream I guess. So I ordered spanakopita, another favorite. What I received was a brown chunk resembling a giant Totino’s pizza roll, on an otherwise bare plate, where it dryly slid around all by itself. It looked and tasted like a Costco product they took out of a package and over-microwaved. The driest, crispest spanakopita I’ve ever had.

    I took a chance and ordered the baklava. It tasted okay but instead of being flaky it was actually soggy - not as in dripping with butter and honey, I mean watery. The only watery baklava I’ve ever had, and also the only serving of baklava in my life that I did not finish.

    A guy dining at the next table asked the waitress for the check, but said he would like a cup of coffee first. I was directly facing the clock and happened to notice it was exactly 7pm. At 7:10 she returned with their check and said, “We’re out of coffee.” Wat? They’re open for another 3 hours and they’re out of coffee LOL? And it took a full 10 minutes to return with this info. It’s a tiny place, I could see the coffee machine like 12 ft away. And there are like six customers. Seemed like a dismally bad restaurant in a sitcom, reminding me somewhat of the diner in The Dark Backward.

    There were a couple other things but that’s all I can remember. Anyway, this new version of the place didn’t last long and it’s permanently closed now.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      2·
      7 days ago

      Baklava shouldn’t be dripping with grease, I’ve seen this too many times and it makes me vom