We'd just finished running errands on Bethel Road, were hungry & felt like Asian food; we saw this place & said "looks busy, should be okay, let's try it".
Short form: the food is tasty, fresh, & filling. The service is friendly without being intrusive, though they're very, VERY hands-off.
However, all that was afterwards. Everything before those two points gave us a lot of misgivings:
First, the signs lining the windows were all in Chinese, with dollar amounts in USD at the bottom of the signs -- LARGE dollar amounts, as in "$99". We had no idea what those signs were for. Husband and I looked at those and had serious second thoughts: "they can't be charging $99 for a meal, right? That's really high-level for Columbus, not strip-mall food pricing...right?"
NOT a good sign. However, we decided those signs had to mean something else, so we went in to see the actual menu and food. Curiosity will be the death of us, I swear.
However, the menu wasn't any better. It was HUGE, a potential red flag. A huge pages-long menu with tons of selections can be a bad sign; it usually means a restaurant is using pre-made low-quality food, like chains do: stuff that can made fast and without care by unskilled workers.
With that said, one of the exceptions to that rule is (usually) Chinese restaurants. They use the same fresh ingredients in many different ways and combinations with very simple preparation to create a variety of dishes.
With THAT said...Coco's menu is not only large & many-itemed, it's CONFUSING. 99% of it is in Chinese, with tons of jumbled pictures & long lists that seemed to be nothing but ingredients, & constantly-repeated (English) phrase next to those pics: "the actual dish you're served may not look like the photo"...uh, what??
That didn't give us any confidence in the food quality.
Add to that, the menu was a huge confusing jumble of stuff with no clear indication of how it was divided or what the sections were supposed to be nor what we were supposed to do with the various meats and veg ingredients listed...well...
At that point, the only thing that kept us from going elsewhere was that the place was fairly busy, with a lot of families -- it couldn't be that bad, right?
Sometimes I'm too stubborn for my own good.
When you sit down at a Coco's table, the first thing you notice is a metal plate in the center of the table -- from surreptitiously watching other diners, it looked like that metal thing was for some sort of hot broth, used in a variation on fondue. However, staring at other diners to figure out what this restaurant expects its customers to do is rude. The menu was no help: as I said, everything on it was in Chinese, except for actual names of ingredients and only a VERY scant English section for a few typical Chinese-American dishes. Yet even THAT small section was divided into sub-sections that seemed to imply you had to pick the ingredients you wanted and how you wanted them prepared. But with everything but the ingredient names being in Chinese, we had to guess at what we were supposed to do.
In other words, you'll be guessing at what you're ordering.
Husband and I weren't interested in typical Chinese-American fare, we wanted to try the broth/soup/fondue stuff that we saw on other tables (the hotpot?), but we couldn't figure out the menu enough to order it. We'd also spotted something that looked like a salad bar at the back, and wondered if we were supposed to do something similar to the mongolian grill chain restaurant, but again, no signs, no instructions, and a very confusing menu. We finally gave up and went with what little we hoped we understood (the typical generic stuff) and hoped we'd guessed right.
I'm getting exhausted just trying to describe this. I know I'm not describing it very well; the menu is THAT incomprehensible, the servers that unhelpful.
I mean, like I said, the food we got was fresh and well-made, but I can't figure how how Coco's expects to attract new customers. The menu comes off as downright hostile to anyone who doesn't read the language, the servers unhelpful & hands-off.
I so badly want to give Coco's a good review. I really do. The food we did get was fresh, tasty, and well-made. But the stuff we were interested in trying was barricaded behind an incomprehensible & confusing menu, unhelpful servers, and a restaurant that didn't even try to meet us halfway.
Coco's, if anyone there reads this: GET SOMEONE WITH ACTUAL EXPERIENCE IN DESIGNING MENUS TO REDO/SIMPLIFY YOURS. Preferably someone who can help you bridge the culture gap & explain things to new customers who can't speak Chinese. Even having a separate translated menu in English would help. As it is, we felt railroaded into getting stuff that every other Chinese restaurant in town offers, not whatever it is you seem to specialize in making.
And that's a damn shame. read more