Bashu Seafood Restaurant

The moment I ate here I knew the ratings for this restaurant would be quite low because of service. The food is really good (comparable to Chinese food you’ll find in Markham, Ontario) and the pricing is reasonable BUT you’ll have to go in with low expectations service wise.

The food was unbelievably good. Although service was sub-​par when the servers came to you they were very happy, polite, knowledgable, and appreciative. Nevertheless, lack of constant service didn’t sway my experience because the food made up for it. The whole restaurant was very clean, especially the bathrooms, and décor was authentic and didn’t seem «cheap». Overall experience was absolutely fantastic but the star was lost because servers were sometimes hard to wave down.

I know it is a new restaurant and there is a period of growing pain, but the criticism regarding the service operation here is justified. The wait staff function more like kitchen runners and will only attend to you if you are able to flag them down. We were there for lunch/​dim sum and they were all running around like free-​range, headless chickens. We ordered three dishes: a stuffed beancurd roll (nicely steamed and decent filling), shanghai fried noodle (good portion but a little too oily), and a hainanese chicken with rice dish. Sadly, the latter never made it to our table even after a 35 minute wait. How do I know? Because an order slip with a time stamp on it is taped to your table to theoretically ensure the system is smooth and everything is correct. The only trouble is no one bothered to come around and check if all the items were delivered afterwards. What made it irritating was the spectacle of watching the servers clearly being confused and repeatedly carrying dishes to the wrong tables even with the slips before them. If you want to promote a classy image — as this restaurant does — then you need to devise and run a better system to serve your patrons than the haphazard one it is using.

In short, my experience at this restaurant was disappointing. I had high expectations going in.
Décor was nice — it looks like they spent some money on this. The restaurant looks much nicer than other sit-​down Chinese restaurants in this area. Even the menu looks like a magazine.
However, everything else was not up-​to-​par. The service was bad. Granted, the restaurant is fairly new. We waited a long time to get our food. They kept making lots of mistakes throughout the service — bringing food that we did not order, being slow to bring the bills, etc…
Food-​wise, the selection looks good and fairly authentic. Sadly, it tasted average.

Sadly did not enjoy our visit at this new seafood restaurant! We tried to order their peking duck, crispy chicken and crab dumplings which were all sold out or required preordering. Want seafood? You must also preorder. I hate it when resto do not specify which dishes require preordering. We tried their hot n sour soup and their regular pork soup dumplings which were good. $ 10 for a small soup and $ 10 for 6 dumplings. The only other dish that was decent was their spicy cold beef. All in all a restaurant that is overpriced and poorly executed chinese wok fry dishes! Service was also poor as it took 20minutes tk get someones attention to place our order and we had to ask 3 times for teaspoons for the kids! Their food is definitely inconsistent as our friends had recommended the place a week before!

We asked for fried rice without an egg (I know it’s weird but that’s how I like my fried rice).
They charged me an extra $ 1 to not put an egg in the fried rice, wut?
The food was very average.
But what ticked me off about this place is the use of shark fin in their menu (see pictures).
While China is becoming increasingly aware of what shark fin is doing to the population of sharks, there are still people who choose to not educate themselves about the issue, or do not care, possibly because they lack morals.
Being Chinese, I believe this issue is a dark eye to my culture.
I don’t see why the love for any food — which amounts to but a few moments in time — should get to utterly devastate the entire lifetime of other animals.
The art of eating is a celebration of life, not destruction.
Cultures can change, extinction does not.
I will find fried rice without egg elsewhere in Ottawa.