Ichiban Boshi @ Causeway Point

This is the first time I am doing a bad review on a restaurant, and I am surprised that I coming up with a review when I am angry took way faster than writing a good review. I believe service excellence is more important than the taste of the food. Even if the food is good, but the service fails, it would certainly affect my mood and appetite. 

I have been to Ichiban several times, but was really disappointed at their service level this time round.

This is how Ichiban Boshi @ Causeway Point fail so badly in terms of their service:

1. The food took more than the promised 20minutes and close to 1 hour to serve. Overpromising instead of underpromising which fails really terribly in terms of service management. 

2. Staff do not even know what is happening in the kitchen that resulted in the slow preparation of food, or perhaps they were pretending not to know and did not give a proper explanation to customers. When asked a couple of times when our food will be coming as we had waited for half an hour, the staff keep saying she will check and in the end coming back to us saying she do not understand what is happening inside. I feel that she is kind of pushing the blame to the kitchen.

3. Despite the slow delivery of food, the restaurant continues to accept customers, leading to more disappointment. Food is actually served to customers who order later than those who ordered way before. 

4. The food which are actually relatively easy to prepare took so long to be served, especially udon and cha soba. I do not understand why they need that long to prepare. My sister got her udon served first, but they gave her a wrong order. Funny thing that they serve our meal incomplete, udon without the tempura, Kaisen Kaninabe without the rice. 

5. No monetary compensation in terms of discounts. Only serving two scoops of ice cream for a table of 5. I was expecting one ice cream each per person, but was served with a plate two scoops of ice cream which they expect us to share amongst ourselves using forks to eat. The staff could not even find the spoons at first. We saw a table with two persons being given the same amount of ice cream as us. Such fair compensation. 

6. The whole service management of the team from the manager to the chefs and servers really lack communication. Feels like they do not know how to stay calm during such situations and fumble, serving wrong orders to tables. I noticed some customers who left halfway throughout after not being served for so long. The dinner was supposed to be a happy meetup with a friend but ended up dampening our mood so much. We were starving from that waiting.

When we were paying for our bill, the manager gave us another loyalty card, but I told him I do not need it anymore as I would not return. He asked us to give them another chance and wanted to compensate with extra chops (which we did not get on the loyalty card). He threw in free dessert on next return too but I would not want to bother quoting his name, too troublesome and not worth another trip just for that. 

I apologize for the lengthy post with no pictures. Normally my posts would be filled with pictures of food and the store layout, but as soon as my food came, I was too hungry and had no mood to take any photos. The food was not that fantastic and I believe that you could not really mess up cha soba which is so easy to make just by boiling.