Wild Ginger

Wild Ginger is a long-standing Seattle staple, known for serving upscale Southeast Asian cuisine in the heart of Downtown and Bellevue. However, during my most recent lunch visit, I had one of the most frustrating restaurant experiences that I have had in a long time. Despite having a 12:30 PM reservation on a Tuesday and arriving promptly to a nearly empty dining room, it still took ten minutes just to be seated. The service was so lackluster that we seriously contemplated walking out multiple times. After being handed menus, we sat for fifteen minutes before a single staff member approached us. We had no water, no way to ask questions about the menu, and no server in sight. When our server finally did appear, he offered no apology or acknowledgment of the delay, nor did he bring water to the table. As for the menu itself, everything is really expensive. I understand Wild Ginger presents itself as an upscale restaurant, but nothing is really that special or fancy about it. All of the dishes are pretty standard and don't have any sort of creative twist. A chicken fried rice, one of the most basic dishes, is already 24 dollars. After tip and tax, that becomes 30 dollars just for fried rice. Also, having looked at pictures online, most of the portions looked really small for the price. Although some dishes sounded more interesting, I opted for the pad thai, simply because I wanted to ensure I would feel full after spending 30 dollars. After putting in our order, we waited another 40 minutes for the food to come out. There were only four of us dining, and each of us only ordered one dish, so there really wasn't a good reason for everything to take so long. The pad thai came out lukewarm. I didn't try everyone else's food, but I was severely disappointed by this. I imagine the food was sitting in the back for some time, getting cold. However, the taste and flavor of the pad thai wasn't bad. The noodles were bouncy and chewy with a nice crunchy contrast from the peanuts. The sauce was nice and tangy with a balanced sweet and citrus flavor that coated the noodles really well. This was the only redeeming factor of the entire experience. It ended up being a bit too much food, and I wanted to take it to go. Once again, our server was nowhere to be found. He wasn't the one to run our food to our table, and he never checked in on us at any point after we got our food. Since there was barely anyone at the restaurant, I was confused as to what he could have been doing. One busser came by our table to pick up some plates, and we asked him if he could bring us some boxes. He said he would, then disappeared and never came back. Eventually, it got so bad that we had to stand up and approach a staff member at the front to ask for boxes and the bill. Shortly after, our server came to our table and said he didn't know we were in a rush and offered to box our food up for us. But instead, we just asked him to bring the boxes to us and get us the check. Somehow, the whole experience just for lunch took right around two hours. I assume the restaurant was understaffed, but that doesn't excuse the complete lack of presence during the entire service. While the food itself remains decent, there are many other options that offer similar food with far better experiences for half the price. Especially for lunch, I wouldn't recommend Wild Ginger, and I won't be coming back any time soon.