August Gatherings

Very rude server.

The food is surprisingly good here. The place has been around for years, and it has progressed into a landmark Cantonese restaurant with many updates, including tomahawk steak. The service was good today because of the late lunch. They could be pushy for other customers when busy. Parking: It's inside Chinatown. Driving is a nightmare here.

The food at August is wonderful, dishes like the thinly sliced tofu soup are yummy and not easily available at other restaurants. The ginger scallion lobster it deliciously prepared, and comes with great soft flat noodles on the side. The pumpkin shaped dimsum with custard inside stood out from others. The scallops with clear noodles at the base were excellent. Service is attentive. I photos the restaurant looks more upscale than real life, but that does not take away from the great cooking.

Decent food, though small portions for the price. The main issue was the service was abysmal. On your screen, in pictures this place probably looks pretty stylish and cozy - but read on to discover that there's more going on that warrants thinking twice before going. Immediately upon seating they inform you of a time limit - understandable and I do appreciate upfront communication. However while deciding what to order, three waiters kept buzzing over us and asking if we were ready at 1 minute intervals. With the fakest lips-pressed-together smiles. When we were ordering, the waiter who took our order tried to upsell us on a much more expensive dish and made snide remarks about our selection choice. Rather than coming off as banter it came off condescending. We ordered 4 larger dishes for 3 people to share and weren't feeling like eating heavy. All 3 waiters who then brought out our food commented on our food choice. How is that professional? We are here to just enjoy some good food not be judged and wheel and dealed. When they brought out the "Assorted Organic Mushrooms Rice In Hot Pot", they forgot to bring serving utensils, no problem we waited. The waiter who came back with utensils began to mix it for us and because my brother was watching closely, the waiter stopped when he noticed a piece of plastic in the rice and offered to make a new one right away. But the way he acknowledged it continued that weird, stand-offish energy. He didn't apologize for the wait or anything - he literally said "--ah. Uhh it seems there's something inside...I'll have a new one made right away." with that same 0.2 second pressed-together "smile". As we were winding down our meal, a waiter came and served our check. No "how was the food" or anything - just slapped it down and asked if he could start taking some dishes away. We still had rice and instead of taking away our soup bowls he took away the rice bowls. As we were working out payment, one of the waiters came out with a dish of 4 quarter sized butter cookies and said "here's something extra" with the cheesiest smile. Let's be real, those stiff glossy cookies are probably 4 cookies out of a 1000 pack from Costco, but even that could have been a cute touch if we weren't already coated with the feeling that this whole experience had been a cheap "pretend-nice" facade. For the restaurant itself -- looks beautiful at first glance, but when you're actually in your booth you'll see that the decor is pretty dinged and banged up. Nicks and scuffs all over the decorations. They've got wine stylishly lit on display that attracts you as you pass by, but actually eating there you'll notice that the nice looking tablecloth is actually throwaway paper thin vinyl that they literally crumple up and replace with each new seating. Just placing a heavy dish on our table was enough to gouge a hole, was hard to take good photos and really drove home the feeling of churn and burn. Consider this - the waiters have clean uniforms and radios, to contrast. Just checked yelp to look up the name of that mushroom dish, and found another person from 2021 who had a very similar experience - so I took my rating from 2 to 1. This is not okay - as a Chinese American I hate this paper thin veneer of "authenticity".

Way too expensive for the food it offers. Still, food was tasty and we had a good time. The thing with the tips in the US has to change. They “forced” us to pay almost 100$ in tips!