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| - Stay away. Far away.
I had been hearing about Fate for a while. I had high expectations, since I had been to Lucky Dragon in the past (the owners prev joint) which was OK.
It was the worst Chinese/Asian I've had in AZ, the service was terrible, the chairs uncomfortable, and to top it off my fiancee got food poisoning.... and has been sick for the last 2 days from it. I took her to the ER this morning at 4:30 AM and decided to finally start posting on Yelp since I've been a lurker for a while.
Aesthetics:
Initially looks like a typical hipster restaurant like you might find in another city. Nice patio, cool inside. However... The seating at a bus stop is more comfy. There is no chair back - just this high bar thing that digs into your back.
I'm going to file this under aesthetics - we ordered the Hot and Sour soup (more on that later) and the waitress suggested it was large enough to share. However, they apparently don't have any kind of serving utensil, so we had to use our little soup spoons to serve ourself soup into another bowl out of this wide shallow terrine. WTF?
Service:
I don't know a nicer way to say it, our waitress was a dopey bimbo. It took 20 minutes for her to take our order. She went missing for long periods of time when I had an empty water glass, and then for a while longer after I tracked her down and asked for some. Not good.
Food:
I ran into a friend there, and he commented at how he loved the food and was surprised we didn't like it. To be blunt, it was utter crap.
The hot and sour soup was thin and spicy. That's it. It tasted like chiles and a splash of rice wine vinegar- no other flavors present. It's not like any hot and sour soup I ever had.... in a bad way. There are these weird chewy dumplings like things in it that would be better served at protecting the floor from your chair leg.
I ordered some Saigon basil something or other dish with beef, she ordered the Lemon Grass whatever with tofu.
My dish was bad. The beef was sliced thin but tough and chewy, and totally lacked flavor. As for basil, there were 2 small basil leaves in the dish, and that's it. The sauce was thin and one dimensional.
Her lemon grass dish was also bad. The sauce tasted like Tom Yum paste from the chinese grocery store mixed with some water. I felt bad for the poor abused tofu.
I'm not a big fan of chain restaurants.... but Pei Wei and Pickup Sticks are about 10x better in terms of food quality and taste. Screw that, even the chinese place in the mall food court is better. I am not exaggerating. It was a very disappointing meal.
Now for the nasty part.
I drank water - Fiancee unit drank th 'Green Tea.' It was like no other green tea I ever had seen. It was leprechaun green, with some kind of milk like substance in it.I thought it looked kinda funky, but she drank it.
It was the only difference between our meals. I tried hers, she tried mine, etc. I didn't drink the science experiment tea.
Well... Several hours later she started having stabbing stomach pains. She spent the whole night up vomiting and with diarrhea. 2 days later the vomiting has subsided but she's missed 2 days of school and is still pooping up a storm. I took her to the ER at 4:30 AM this morning and they confirmed the symptoms were consistent with food poisoning. Admittedly she had just gotten back a 45 days ago from a trip to a 3rd world country where she got (and recovered from) a tropical disease so her immune system is not at it's strongest right now, but come on. This shouldn't be the end result. Plus this IS downtown Phoenix so there are plenty of people around with compromised immune systems, if you know what I mean, due to lifestyle choices.
There is some great Asian food in Central Phoenix.
Maxim and Da Vang are great Vietnamese places on 19th ave.
The Cultural Center has a few great places, esp Golden Buddha.
Thai Lahna has been consistently good for years.
Like I said I don't eat a lot of chain food - but even the Pei Wei at 7th ave and McDowell is way better in terms of food quality.
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