99 Favor Taste, What a Waste

This is the fourth time I've been to 99 Favor Taste and it really disappointed me. To me the crowded restaurant is a facade to deceive you. I was meeting up with a very good friend of mine, Will, who I haven't seen for a year. We bonded through food and food will be our bond. We agreed on an AYCE hot pot for the prices were reasonable.

Will had reserved us a lunch at 2pm. The time slots earlier had all been taken. Can't be choosy people. We ended being seated ay 2:30pm and had wondered whether the people working there had forgotten about us. Once we were seated, we were eagerly looking forward to the food. Our server brought us the banchan. They finally went from six small plates to two duo-plates of banchan; wasting less food. Our banchan was kimchi that didn't tasted like it was fermented well enough, yellow pickled daikon, seaweed knots, and roasted peanuts. Our table was set for one large duopot to which I ordered a pork bone stock and Will had an herbal stock. Here's where things did not go smoothly.

We ordered a bunch of things and our waiter tapped on his tablet the stuff we wanted. When he came back, our plate did not have half the things we ordered and we were given stuff we didn't order at all. It has happened on my previous visit when our orders were switched with another table's but this time I feel it was rather intentional. Our plate had lotus root, soft tofu, mushrooms, and udon noodles which easily fill up the stomach. Since it was AYCE, we didn't bother correcting them, but our orders were continuously missing the items we wanted and we kept ordering until we got what we wanted. I think our servers had the look on their faces wanting to blacklist the both of us. How can these two people go through four plates each of lamb and beef? Should I mention we also ordered chicken and pork along with a bunch of other ingredients? Within the two hours we stuffed ourselves.

The portions always started out small so we kept calling for more meat. By the end of the day, our pot had a thick layer of animal fat. I was very amused seeing that we had eaten that much. This time, the sauce station was not tidy. The sauce bowls were poorly washed and I even picked one up that still had sauce on it. I was rummaging through tub for a cleaner bowl. In my now more fruitful experiences, I made a hot sauce and a soy sauce. I also got myself a large bowl of scallions to which I dumped in my stock for more flavor. The chicken we had was very questionable. No matter how long I cooked it, the flesh remained bloody pink. It didn't have much chicken flavor and I definitely wouldn't order it again like the fish slices I had (terrible flavor). I can also see that this visit to 99 Favor Taste was a terrible mistake. In the most basic of services, you couldn't offer any of us a glass of water? A glass of water couldn't calm my thirst from my consumption of hot sauce. I had to order a soda.

Even though I do have a lot of complaints, there are some good points. Their restroom is clean like always and the service is very courteous. I don't think I have gotten a bad server with a nasty attitude yet. The portions of the food may have been small, but the quality for the most part is there. I'm glad they still retained the quality of the ingredients for an AYCE hot pot. We each paid $29 which includes the $4 tip. I probably wouldn't come back next time for the time being. I think I might want to try other hot pot places.