this is gonna be a long, disorganized, chaotic , and angry post just like the experience i had at little lamb restaurant 2 days ago . if you dont have the patience to read the entire post, here is my conclusion: the very second WORST dining experience i have ever experienced after Giacomo’s Ristorante
where do i start? I have absolutely no expectations for good services whenever I dine at a Chinese restaurant. As long as the service is timely I’d be happy with it. Little lamb def failed terribly in every possible aspect you can imagine.
Little lamb, xiao wei yang, is Mongolian hot pot chain and was just opened its first north American location in beacon hill boston last week. The menu, consisting of various broths and some of my favorite small dishes, looked really promising so I called up a few friends to check it out. We got there at 7:00pm.
The restaurant was half full. We were sat right away. The waiter brought us the menus and left without absolutely no explanations or warning of sold out items. I was confused about several items on the menu so I had to verify with the waiter. Getting the waiter’s attention was the most frustrating thing ever, he would just walk by me knowing that I was waving to him. So at this point, I started to try to get any other waiters’ attention. All of them did the same thing: walking by me knowing that I was trying to get their attention. I started to wonder if little lamb hired all blind workers or i became invisible. Finally, our waiter came, I ask him what’s in the veggie dumplings? He said he has no idea, but he would ask the kitchen for me. Great! I was also confused about another item on the menu, he told me it was sold out. Great! Why didn’t u tell me earlier?
They basically give u a piece of paper which has a list of their items and you can just check it off whatever you would like to order. However, the drinks are not on the paper so you actually have to tell the waiter what you want. We ordered 5 different drinks from the menu and they didn’t have 3 of them. They didn’t even have milk tea. Fine, we will take water.
We waited, waited, and waited. 20 minutes passed. He didn’t even bring us our drinks. He finally brought us 3 drinks but no water for my friends. 40 minutes passed, not only no food was brought to us, the FIRE ALARM WENT OFF.
the drinks sucked.
Seriously, has it ever happened to you? Fire alarm going off in the middle of your meal? It’s bizarre. Thanks to the fire fighters arrived only a few minutes later and turned off the fire alarm so we could return to the restaurant in less than 15 mins. We thought about leaving but for the sake of my blog and all my dear readers out there, we had to get the full experience for you guys so we endured it. We were starving and already waited for 50 mins at this point.
the fire trucks
to give u the ultimate experience, here’s a vid clip
Half of the customers left when we returned inside. They finally brought our hot pot and couple veggie dishes and noodles. So throughout the night the service was EXTREMELY slow. Not only that, after couple hours, they only brought us half of the stuff we ordered. Every time I asked the waiter where the rest of our food was he had no idea what was brought to us and what wasn’t. I had to name each dish that hadn’t been brought to us (not to mention it took me at least 10 mins of staring or waving at the waiter every time I tried to get his attention). He would only bring us 1-2 dishes every time I asked then forgot the rest again. This went on all night. We were super frustrated and starving! He would also name the dishes wrong; no idea what he was bringing to us. At the end of the meal, he still missed a few dishes but we all really just lost all our patience and just asked for the bill. How could this possibly happen!?!??!?!?! We checked everything off on a piece of paper so they should know what exactly we ordered. It’s hot pot! They don’t need to cook anything just wash the veggies and cut the meat and bring them over! How can you mess this up so bad?! They absolutely had no training whatsoever, not even common sense.
the veggie dumplings that the waiter had no clue about – chives, eggs, vermicelli.
at this point, the dinner already lasted 3+ hours. When the bill came, it was TOTALLY wrong. We got charged for some of the stuff that was never brought to us. They also charged us for a bottle of spring water. There was a bottle of spring water on the table but my friend brought that from home. WTFFFFFFF really?!? So I circled every item that was wrong on the bill for him and walked to the cashier with him, the bill kept going up each time he modified it. It took them FOUR tries to finally get the correct amount. At this time, we were beyond mad. They offer to give us some kinda ‘VIP’ card. We rejected it without a second thought. I told them we will never come back again and they ask me cluelessly ‘why’? Their cluelessness got us mad even more. UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH we just wanted to bang our heads against the wall. this whole bill situation took another 30+ minutes, so our entire dinner lasted almost 4 hours. last time i had a 3+ hours dinner was eating a 27- course sushi tasting menu.
in terms of food:
you can get your own sauce
the broth was only ok. flavor wasnt rich at all, jus flat, msg, salty taste. the spiciness was not pleasant, like it was gonna choke up your throat and it wasnt even spicy enough for us.
this was the only time that the water boiled and never boiled again after we dumped food in. the heat was really low even we turned it to high.
the meat was pretty hard, thick, and chewy and too much fat on it.
hot pot meat should be sliced paper thin, melts in your mouth soft and mostly lean meat.
as we were eating, the water kept dripping down on us from the ceiling!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
well flavored, but fried instead of grilled
we order 15+ different kinds of veggies, noodles, dumpling dishes, but since the service was super super super slow and we were starving. i didnt wanna make my friends to wait any longer to take my pictures, so i stopping taking pictures.
since the heat was never hot enough, the oil started to grease together. got pretty nasty.
i understand that they just opened not long ago, but this kinda service is beyond hopeless. if you are not ready, at least start with a soft opening instead of a GRAND opening. Only serve limited amount of people until you get comfortable it. At least realize your mistakes, learn how to use the cashier machine, and have some kinda common sense. food was nothing special, even they had something good, half of the stuff on the menu was not available. Average food with this kinda disastrous service. We will not be back for sure. i dont think they will be ready anytime soon.
if you are still reading, thank you so much you are awesome. i really had a terrible experience and felt even more terrible for putting my friends through this. experiences like this are really unforgettable. RIP my brain cells that died that night from all that frustration and anger!
Little Lamb Restaurant
Categories: Food Do-It-Yourself Food Restaurants Asian Fusion Do-It-Yourself Food, Asian Fusion
326 Cambridge St
(between North Grove St & Grove St)
Boston, MA 02114
Neighborhood: Beacon Hill
(857) 233-2688
