659082 Tue Oct 13 07:17:55 -0700 2009 21 18 Manhattan 0 5099227 This is my first post on ChowHound. I am writing it as a kind of therapy, as a means of understanding what I experienced. And of making sure no one goes through what I have suffered. It is *that* bad. First, about me. I am no gourmet, no "foodie". I can subsist for long periods of time making myself turkey sandwiches and stir fried chicken with vegetables (as long as the ingredients are super fresh). Growing up, though, my mother was a superb cook, kind of an early yuppie who made Indian, Thai, Chinese and Moroccan dishes for us. We also ate out often, usually going to obscure ethnic restaurants in dingier parts of Boston and the surrounding areas, well before that was 'cool.' Anyway... last weekend (October 10, 2009), a would-be gourmand selected the restaurant to celebrate a friend's special occasion: Mr. Chow's Tribeca. I had actually never heard of this place, as I rarely go to "scene" restaurants. So I went with a pretty open mind, though an admitted prejudice against splashy spots. The physical environment is quite nice, downtown chic celebrity cool, I guess. But that is where decency ends and hell begins. For this is a place built for one thing: taking your money. It is entirely engineered around ripping you off, tricking you, upselling you. Constantly. Without end. All night long, you will be swarmed by waiters who are actually smirking at your stupidity for even being there. They will push push push the prix fixe on you, the insane drinks on you. Anything to take your money. My clueless friends let the "knowledgeable" waiter make the selection for our food. Chicken, fish, pork, and some appetizers. I realize this is a food site, but I'm not going to go into vibrant detail about what we were served. Two of the appetizers would have been moderately acceptable in a cheap Chinese restaurant. Moderately acceptable. The rest of the entrees were... they were FOUL. They were inedible. They were DISGUSTING. It was as if the "chefs" were mocking anyone tasteless enough to be at that very restaurant. You could almost taste the contempt for the patrons. The reason I needed to vent here is that I still cannot understand this phenomenon. I simply cannot understand why people are willing to pay $250-$300 PER PERSON for pure garbage like this. There are so many wonderful, fine, elegant, incredible restaurants that die every week, and yet this persists for decades. Are people with this kind of money to waste THAT clueless, THAT tasteless, THAT gauche as to think this is acceptable? Mr. Chow's Tribeca ruined my meal. It ruined my night. It annoyed me for several days. But even worse, it has changed me PHILOSOPHICALLY - made me even more skeptical about the human condition that ever before. I want to make it my mission to put them out of business. Tue Oct 13 07:17:55 -0700 2009 1115944 DonFarber 1 5099263 Your sentiments echo much of what is said about the place by others. In fact, I have never read a good review. How they stay in business is a mystery to me. There are two lessons here... don't eat at Mr. Chow and always check reviews on Chowhound, menu pages etc... you would have been warned Tue Oct 13 07:30:32 -0700 2009 5099227 99909 msny98 2 5099281 Oh, I would never, ever have selected Mr. Chow's in a million years. I found out that it was the spot too late to change - and anyway, I couldn't have changed it anyway, out of politeness. The ironic thing is, the person who selected it has all these snobby airs of "sophistication." I actually fell for her act until I experienced the debacle of the restaurant she apparently "loves". I can't even think about her without laughing now. Tue Oct 13 07:36:43 -0700 2009 5099263 1115944 DonFarber 3 5099360 "I couldn't have changed it anyway, out of politeness." There are some things that are so hideous that they transcend politeness. When your wife says "We've been invited to a dinner in Hell in honor of Hannibal Lecter. We have to go - Satan is expecting us" it's perfectly acceptable to beg off on the grounds that you have made prior plans. Tue Oct 13 08:04:15 -0700 2009 5099281 10162 Bob Martinez 4 5099371 i laughed. as for mr. chow tribeca...ive never been but i regularly see harvey keitel eating with his family outside on the patio there. Tue Oct 13 08:08:22 -0700 2009 5099360 14393 sam1 5 5109083 perhaps the family tradition is one of bulimia? Fri Oct 16 15:37:25 -0700 2009 5099371 12064 david sprague 1 5099776 I love reading Mr. Chow reviews! They are all the same and all so terrible. I wish we had a Mr. Chow Board. Tue Oct 13 10:14:27 -0700 2009 5099227 24925 chow_gal 2 5099814 The uniformity extends to the Beverly Hills location, too, so it's nice to see that their quality control system is working just fine. Tue Oct 13 10:25:45 -0700 2009 5099776 10131 Chandavkl 1 5099813 Your very entertaining review will come to the enormous surprise of exactly no one on Chowhound. I'm sorry you had to endure it, and I'm more sorry that you got fleeced. But you can take solace in the fact that you are not alone. I personally am fortunate enough never having set foot in one of the Mr Chows, and I do not plan to. Unless, of course, I'm not paying and whoever IS paying isn't a personal friend. Even so, if I were to have any say at all, I would not let it happen. Tue Oct 13 10:25:12 -0700 2009 5099227 94227 egit 1 5099819 Outside of the food, can you elaborate on the upselling and tricking you mention. Tue Oct 13 10:26:49 -0700 2009 5099227 79984 princeofpork 2 5099857 They start you with the champagne, never mentioning it is $30 a glass and then convince you to double order everything... Tue Oct 13 10:38:18 -0700 2009 5099819 99909 msny98 2 5099903 Yes. First, they mumbled something about "sparkling water or mmmph"? I said "flat is fine". I realize this is an old trick, but I assumed the "flat" choice was tap. Wrong. Two $10 bottles of spring water came to the table. That could be ascribed to my fault, I guess, but it's still effing sleazy. Worse, the waiter essentially forced the table to do prix fixe. I BEGGED my party to assemble a meal, but no one was listening, and I've learned over time that socially you have to go with the flow sometimes. So they assembled some HUGELY expensive prix fixe meals where just cobbling together entrees and appetizers would've been relatively cheaper. We got absolute HOSED on this. Finally, the bill comes completely un-itemized. No way of seeing what the charges are and I suspect around $50 worth of complete bulls--t on it. But again, it was my friend's big celebration and I had to bite my tongue to keep from ruining it. I have never hated any restaurant more than this in my entire life. Tue Oct 13 10:51:40 -0700 2009 5099819 1115944 DonFarber 3 5099998 What was the reaction when the rest of the group saw the check? Tue Oct 13 11:18:05 -0700 2009 5099903 10162 Bob Martinez 4 5100081 Actually, here's the saving grace: for various reasons (long, boring explanation) no one was drinking that night. So the tab was stupid expensive, but not an out of this world, cosmic disaster. Have we been drinking, the bill would've been hundreds of dollars more, probably including additional phony charges that they'd assume tipsy people wouldn't contest. So the response to the tab was fairly muted, though some headscratching over around $50 that no one wanted to pursue. Tue Oct 13 11:45:04 -0700 2009 5099998 1115944 DonFarber 5 5100101 I gather that at the end of the evening nobody said "Golly, that was swell. We really need to get back here soon." In other words, Mr. Chow is a once in a lifetime experience. Tue Oct 13 11:50:49 -0700 2009 5100081 10162 Bob Martinez 5 5143655 LOL-You let them get away with that? As far as I can tell they systematically "accidentally" add money to the bill. The last time I ate at Mr. Chow was the 57th st location in the 90s. My girlfriend insisted on going there. She hung out there occassionally with some "friends" and wanted to go. I get the bill and being good at Math, add it up in my head. There was a $20 discrepancy in their favor. I call the waiter over and tell him that the bill was wrong and that he should go fix it. He had the nerve to challenge me. So I told him more forcefully to go fix it. He comes back with the corrected bill and tells me that there was an extra vegetable on it. So, I say "show me where you crossed it off". Well, there was no extra veggie, just extra MONEY for them. Every single person I have told that story to and subsequently been to Mr. Chow has found their check to be incorrect. Your experience is par for the course. I have never been back and will never go back. Fri Oct 30 13:20:05 -0700 2009 5100081 15970 sushiman 1 5110518 Hilarious review -- as for putting them out of business though, the name seems to pop up quite often as "______ (insert celebrity name here) was seen dining at Mr. Chow" (most recently Madonna at the same location as your review) so we'd have to get those celebrities to have better taste in food -- probably not possible! Sat Oct 17 12:05:54 -0700 2009 5099227 241434 uwsister 1 5112885 that place isn't for eating, its just for a certain class of people that have a lot of money, want people to know that they have no problems spending a lot of money on crappy food and couldn't care less about the food anyway. Sun Oct 18 15:41:00 -0700 2009 5099227 12656 bigjeff 1 5140357 I can't ever recall a "celebrity hangout" getting so totally skewered for poor food quality. And over and over again. It seems that Mr. Chow's restaurants are kinda like a P.F. Chang's for the rich and famous. So long as there are people who really don't give a hoot about Chinese food, both of these establishments will survive. Thu Oct 29 09:57:07 -0700 2009 5099227 270888 shaogo 2 5140377 it's nore (or less) than just that, shaogo. think of mr chow as a truly spectacular alignment of incompetence and not just a bad restaurant. maybe a bizarro-world mirror image of Per Se, where every possible detail is wrong, wrong, wrong, rather than a celeb den serving blech food, think of this as one of the two or three worst restaurants in nyc...maybe even in america ..at this price point. then consider the antipathy here in that light. Thu Oct 29 10:02:58 -0700 2009 5140357 12064 david sprague 2 5143508 The New York Times review of the NYC branches of Harry's Bar was skewered in the same way. It was last year or the year previous. Fri Oct 30 12:20:30 -0700 2009 5140357 233059 mahler5 1 5143749 Amazingly the food at the first of the beta places mentioned links which sometimes appear at the top of this page, Chinese Food on Henry St., is far superior to Mr. Chow, even though most of their items are $1 to $2 per order. Fri Oct 30 13:52:29 -0700 2009 5099227 10131 Chandavkl