I like the year-old space, it's a cool, sort of dive bar atmosphere, hipstered up for the Palermo…read morecrowd who want to say they went to a dive bar, but don't actually want to sully their loafers by setting in foot in a real one. Service is attentive. The food is even reasonably good, though not more than that - it's like Asian bar snacks made by someone who likes Asian bar snacks, but doesn't quite know how to do them right.
And they were just out of way too much stuff. The bar offers up nine specialty cocktails, plus a half dozen happy hour specials. They were "out of" three of the former and two of the latter - that's a third of their cocktail menu missing. And, for example, I ordered a cocktail that came with gin, lemon, wasabi, and bitters. They were "out of wasabi". But... two or three of the food items come with wasabi, right there from the kitchen. But no, they're out of wasabi, and just not putting it on those plates, apparently, and not telling anyone.
And that was the first big issue. Not telling. We ordered two types of dumplings, the pork potstickers and the prawn wontons. But the latter turned out to be mushroom, because, no prawns. But no one told us. We sent them back, especially because they're charging the same price for mushroom wontons as prawn ones. I wonder if they're deep frying mushrooms for the deep-fried prawn dish? The two folk sitting next to us sat there and had a conversation with the chef about the poke bowl and what kind of white fish he uses. He happily discussed it all, and then when they ordered it, sent them a salmon poke bowl, because he didn't have any white fish. WTF? They sent it back.
But... here's the big problem. I know it's a small kitchen, but you can't stand there and plate food on a dirty cutting board, with raw chicken on it. You can't throw a pile of raw meat onto a dirty counter, next to a dirty rag, next to the cutting knife you just used to cut up raw chicken, and then plate food on top of it all without cleaning any of it. At one point the chef pulled out another rag, wiped the knife blade, wiped the cutting board, wiped the counter, and then... wiped his hands and stuck the rag back off to the side. Had we noticed before getting and eating our food, we'd have walked out, but we were chatting, and it wasn't until after eating that I started really watching what they were doing. Check please.
So, this is the food we ate. Some pork potstickers (170 pesos), some chicken yakitori skewers (230 pesos), and some ribeye skewers (250 pesos). All drowned in some sort of semi-sweet soy sauce, with wilted beansprouts on the side. Okay at best. 'nuff said, I wouldn't fu-king set foot in this place again, but for the sake of customer health, maybe a health inspector should. Or hey guys, just clean up your act.
If I've got my info right, the chef/team behind this place is the same as El Quinto, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised on the quality of the food, but I am on the standards of food handling. Then again, I didn't see the kitchen at El Quinto....
