Great food. Being a sissy candy-pants vegetarian, I love that I can substitute their awesome lightly-batter fried tofu for anything on the menu, and this is the only place in LA I've been to that serves scallion pancakes as an appetizer; these are very common in Boston and NY, and I miss them profusely (according to my last ladyfriend, who is Chinese-American, pretty much any Chinese restaurant will make them for you if you ask them in Chinese, but unfortunately I am of Scandanavian extraction as opposed to Mandarin, and I took Nihongo instead of Chuugo).
Service can be awesome or it can be utterly frustrating. I've gone from being seated to eating my entree in less than 15 minutes, and i've been seated and then had the waitress blow past me two dozen times in 15 minutes before I get my water. There have been a few times I've even gotten to order, and then ask her if I can have some water and some of the fried wontons they are supposed to, theoretically at least, bring out free of charge... and she's like "Oh yeah, sorry." Last Friday we went and I can say with complete honesty that I have never been told "I'll be right with you" so many times in one location; after the third or fourth time I quite believing her...
Delivery service isn't bad, it's usually 45 mins or so if you're in Santa Monica or Venice. I've always had my dish as requested, and have nevr been missing anything. The fact that they're now open till 3am some nights of the week is a godsend, as I work PM and the only other place that you could sit down with someone at was La Cabana, which is awesome, but, variety is a beautiful thing.
So why would I give a place that I'll admit has service that is, at best, stoned and manic and at worst just plain bad a good rating? Because the food is freakin' awesome, first of all, and second of all, the service is so bizarre that it's almost endearing. It may take forever to get your Lettuce Cups, but they mean well; they may take forever but it's never because they're being vindictive or snotty, it's just that the place is generally very busy and certainly quirky.
The music is played pretty loudly and the acoustics lend themselves to amplifying everything so it can be quite noisy. Last week, Purple Rain was playing and the CD started skipping... it took about four minutes before I managed to point out to the waitress that it'd been repeating "Purp" over and over, and she looked confused for a minute, listened, said "oh, it is, huh?" and went and switched CD's. I don't know whether that's cute OR pathetic, or both!
The $1 Beijing Spring Rolls are killer: they're big as far as spring rolls go, and like everything there, they're made TO ORDER from fresh ingredients. The Lettuce Cups are great and enough food to be counted as an entree as opposed to an appetizer (they're prices accordingly, between an appetizer and an entree). My absolute favorite dish there is the Orange Ginger Tofu; ask for extra scallions and peppers and it's 10x tastier. Their teas are all quite excellent and the homemade ginger ale is generally pretty awesome (I had it one time and it was REALLY bad, but they took it off the tab and gave me a free pot of green tea instead). If you're going there with a few people to eat, drink and be merry, you probably won't notice that the service is subpar... you will however want to come back for more spring rolls. read more