Let me start by saying I only occasionally post Yelp! reviews and I have never posted a "bad"…read morerating for any restaurant as I wouldn't want my one poor experience to taint the restaurant's review pool and rating, but...
We had a sub-par experience at this restaurant a few weeks ago when dining with my wife, however I decided to give it another try this week with my daughter. Sorry to say the restaurant did not redeem itself; so I wrote a novel if you really want the details:
PART I:
On our first visit, (weekday evening, no reservation) I asked the server for her recommendation between two dishes, one of which was a shrimp dish. She SPECIFICALLY endorsed the shrimp dish, even repeating the name back to me. When my dish came out it was a chicken dish, and frankly, did not even seem to match the description of the shrimp dish (i.e., not just a substitution of the meat but I believe it was the wrong dish entirely.)
I did not notice the error immediately (the food took forever to arrive so I was starving) but after a few bites I figured out this was not what I had ordered. We politely asked the server what was "up" and she said we ordered the chicken dish. My wife & I both separately reminded her that we SPECIFICALLY had the conversation about her recommending the shrimp, she not only did not apologize but suggested that WE made the error. She then reluctantly asked me if I wanted the kitchen to remake the order but I told her "No" since I was already halfway into the dish and I knew how long it would take them to replace it.
When the bill came, I noticed that they still had charged me for the shrimp dish, which was about $8 more that the equivalent shrimp dish. So, for the nerve, they tried to charge me anyway for the dish that was not even served to me. To compound matters further, when I asked the server to adjust the price to that of the chicken dish, rather than apologize for the error and offer to correct it immediately, her dismissive response was "I'll see what I can do."
After a 10-minute hunt for the manager (who was "in the back" attending to apparently more important matters), she came back with the corrected bill. Manager never came to our table and the server never acknowledged nor apologized for the poor experience and the series of errors.
PART II:
My daughter is vegan and wanted Thai food. I had remembered that Noi had a lot of vegetarian options so I decided to give them another try. This time I made a lunch reservation online; it was early and few diners were in the restaurant so I was hopeful we'd have a better experience this time.
My dish (chicken satay; hard to screw it up) was just fine, except for no apparent reason it was served with three pieces of tiny toast, which appeared to be merely grilled compressed pieces of white bread. I teased the server a bit about it in a good-natured way, he conceded also it was somewhat a weird, not-so-Thai item.
My daughter ordered a bowl of Tom-Ka, which arrived hot and she found acceptable. She also ordered a spinach & tofu dish. She had been told the spinach would be lightly sauteed, however, when it arrived it looked like about 20% of the spinach had been cooked and the rest just looked like a fresh spinach salad. Worse, it arrived COLD.
I expressed my concerns about the spinach dish to the server, and asked the kitchen to remake it. Much to his credit (unlike the first server) he offered to do so without hesitation.
When the replacement dish came, however, it was significantly different than the first. While it did have spinach and tofu, mixed vegetables had somehow been added to the dish; suggesting confusion in the kitchen as to how to prepare the same dish twice the same way within the same half-hour period. Getting extra veggies was not problematic, except for the baby corn, which had a sour taste, possibly from being stored too long or a bad batch of canning.
After the server returned to our table to then ask if everything was OK, my daughter noticed, and retrieved with her chopsticks, a coiled shard of what appeared to be aluminum foil or some other type of metal fragment. The server, again to his credit, IMMEDIATELY apologized and offered to to the dish off the bill, which he did. And, after all the dishes were cleared, he also offered a complementary dessert, which we declined as we had an appointment to get to.
I intentionally do not identify servers by name in a poor review, but conversely, I DO give credit where credit is due for good service. Harrison was our server on the second visit, and he was awesome. He diplomatically addressed the various mistakes made by the kitchen and took responsibility, even though the errors were not actually his (contrast this with the experience we had with the "anonymous" server from our first visit.)
P.S., I made sure to tip Harrison based on what would have been the original cost of the meal had not the one entree been removed from the bill; he did a great job!
