King of Ketchup ripped off by UWS Cottage’s “All You Can Drink” Wine

January 3, 2008

***DISCLAIMER*** The review you are about to read is written by King of Ketchup NOT the NYC Food Guy. King of Ketchup is a friend of the site and his opinions do not represent those of NYC Food Guy.

As seasoned bargain-hunters and lovers of everything Szechuan, a few friends and I decided to check out The Cottage last Friday night — a Chinese restaurant on the UWS that supposedly served unlimited wine with dinner. The Cottage (a ridiculous name for a Chinese restaurant) sits at the corner of 77th & Amsterdam, just a few blocks away from another Chinese restaurant with all-you-can-drink wine, Silk Road Palace. I went to “the palace” years ago when I was still underage, but I do recall that the speed and ferocity in which they continued to refill our empty wine glasses was incredible; at no point during the meal did we have fewer than two full carafes of wine on the table. So fast-forward to last Friday night, and let me walk you through the dining experience at the “other” all-you-can-drink wine restaurant, The Cottage.

8 pm: Two friends and I enter the restaurant, and tell the woman at the desk we’re going to be five people. She gives us an attitude, and refers us to another Asian woman, who writes our name down on a list, telling us we can’t be seated until our entire party arrives.

8:15pm: We ask the woman if we can have some wine while we wait to be seated (Silk Road Palace gives its patrons wine while they wait). Woman does not even consider this feasible and immediately replies “No” as she hurries away.

8:25pm: We see open tables, ask the hostess if we can sit down, and tell her we’ll order appetizers while we wait for our friends to show up. She says, flatly, “No.”

8:30pm: We tell the woman our friends won’t be joining us, and politely tell her we’ll take a table for three when it frees up.

8:33pm: Our friends call back and say they’re now going to come, so we tell the woman to switch it back to a table of five. She is clearly NOT happy with this, and acts like this is the world’s biggest inconvenience…like her sole job in life as a hostess isn’t to accommodate groups of patrons who want to eat dinner in her restaurant.

8:45pm: We discuss leaving The Cottage and going to Silk Road Palace, since we’re all starving and absolutely despise the hostess.

9:10pm: The hostess tells two men seated at a table by the door to leave, taps my buddy on the shoulder, points to the table, and says, “GO, GO, GO!”

The waitress comes over, we order our food, and she brings us one carafe of white wine. We ask for another (we’re five hungry and thirsty adults looking to get our night started!), and she says “No, finish this one first.” We finish it within seconds (literally), and call her over to refill it. We also ask her to bring some noodles and duck sauce, to which she responds “OK.” We never saw those noodles, or any duck sauce.

They bring out our appetizers within five minutes, but no wine. I’m not gonna lie, the scallion pancakes and steamed dumplings were delectable. We asked again for more wine, the woman nodded, and didn’t bring us more wine as requested. When the busboy came to clean up the appetizers, we asked him for more wine. He brought another carafe, and then we proceeded to watch the lady in charge scream at him in Chinese, basically destroying this poor guy’s life in front of the entire restaurant.

Our main courses came out soon after that, and once again, our wine glasses were empty. I ask the hostess for more wine as she passes our table, and I literally get waved off as she acts as if this is an absurd request. Completely appalled and fed up, I lean over to the empty table behind us, and take the half-full carafe that was left there, filling up my friends’ glasses. This got the attention of the lady in charge. She comes over and tries to take the carafe out of my hand, but I pull it back and finish filling our glasses. We tell her if she isn’t going to bring us wine, we’ll get it ourselves. Then she tells us “no more wine.”

Uh oh. No she di-innt! We say, “What do you mean? This is all-you-can-drink, and we’re not even finished with our main course, please bring us more wine.” She tells us the place is not in fact unlimited wine, and that we are mistaken. Wow. Wow. Wow.

I tell her “the only reason we came here is because of the unlimited wine, stop lying to us and treating us like crap, this is absolutely atrocious.”  My buddy tells her he called the restaurant earlier in the afternoon and asked if it was all-you-can-drink wine with dinner, and the woman he spoke to said flatly, “Yes.” The woman tells us if we want more wine, it’ll cost us $15. We tell her to bring us more wine, and we’re not paying for it. She begrudgingly abides, and tells us this is our “last one.”

In awe, I get the phone number off the menu, go outside, and call the restaurant. I ask, “is this the Chinese restaurant that serves unlimited wine with dinner?”  The woman responds, “Yes! 77th and Amsterdam.” Haha, you just can’t make this up.

We received a bill of $58.50, left them an overly generous $1.50 tip, and headed to our next destination.

The people who run this place are rude, mean and unaccommodating, making for one of the worst dining experiences I’ve ever had in my life. The food was good (and cheap), but if you want to get drink copious quantities of free wine on the UWS and grub on some Chinese food, Silk Road Palace is where it’s at. I will never step foot in The Cottage again.

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