Suzhou: Lunch at De Yue Lou

The Missus and I attempted to hit at least one restaurant that featured well known local cuisine in each city. In Suzhou it was easy to find. Right off the inevitable Guan Qian Jie was a location of De Yue Lou, a Suzhou institution. De Yue Lou was originally founded during the Ming Dynasty under Emperor Jiajing.

If you're walking at night, you can't miss this location......

 

My goodness...... Vegas eat your heart out!

During the day the place looks a bit more subdued. The Missus and I decided to have lunch here since we figured it would be less crowded....plus we'd already done a good bit of walking and were famished.

 

This was one of those multi-level monstrous restaurants that we came across everywhere in China.

We were seated away from the crowds on the second floor overlooking the street.

 

Even more monstrous than the restaurant was the appallingly bad service.....bad even by Chinese standards. With nothing to motivate the young Servers who seemed to want to be somewhere else.....they would forget things, and not care if you complained about it....in fact they would complain about you having to ask for rice four times! There's no reward for doing a good job, no tips, demanding customers....so it seems that the attitude is to do the least, and disappear whenever possible. I could use words like apathetic, dismissive, but 'nuff said.

The menu is quite large........ and even includes this blurb in English.

 

Wanting to develop a baseline, we started with a Suzhou standard, the "Smoked Fish" which we always seem to get in places that serve "Su Cai" (Jiangsu cuisine), Huiyang cuisine, and even a good number of Shanghainese restaurants in the DGV.

 

Strangely, the flavor of this was very close to what we get at Chin's on Miramar Road, perhaps a bit sweeter, and much more tender....but very close!

There was one dish I wanted to try in Suzhou:

 

It was the Song Shu Gui Yu (松鼠桂鱼), the Squirrel Shaped Mandarin Fish. Versions we've had of this had always been really sweet, and not very good. But this was Suzhou.......

 

They should use this as signage during the evening as it looked glowing neon red...... as it arrived, it gave us both a start, bringing on memories of the gloppy-teeth aching sweet, artificial tasting sweet sour stuff served all over the place in the states. But it was not.....there was a light, complex and fruity sweetness, the fish was lightly fried, airy and crisp, almost melting in your mouth.

 

This was delicious, and we finished every thing we could......

The vegetables were also perfectly prepared.

 

Bai He (Lily Bulb), mildly starchy and sweet, the bittermelon added a good bitter contrast, but was also nice and crisp. The red peppers were sweet, and the cloud ears added an earthy flavor, grounding the dish.

In spite of the atrocious service, the food was very good...... we're still talking about that fish. Not sure if i'd go back if we return to Suzhou, though.

 

Comments

[kat]

that is RED! glad the food made up for the service.

[Dennis]

Wow, I'm surprised the fish wasn't too sweet! Loved the front view, he he..

[Kirk]

Hi Kat - The food was good....too bad the service was really bad.

Hi Dennis - If you're interested, there are places that make that dish.... though not as well in the SGV.

[Jason]

That's funny, we also noticed the lack of service in china. One of our theories was that it was due to the political ideology of the country, where there wasn't much incentive to excel for a tip. Our other theory was that these were just uninspired kids who were just looking for some quick bucks before they moved onto another job. I suppose one theory is more profound than the other... oh well.

[Jason]

I should add that we also found it funny that when we went to some of the nicer restaurants in Shanghai, the opposite was true. It was like service overload. You had just groups of servers just standing there waiting for something to do, you sneeze and someone is there to wipe your nose.

[Hangzhou Hero]

So a major reason that service has gotten progressively shoddy is for a few reasons that my relatives told me while I was there:
One is, as Jason and you suspected, there's little incentive. The general attitude of any customer in China is generally ungrateful and so service also reflects this-- not much is there to keep someone going.
But take for instance, Japan, where there's no tipping at all in any restaurant yet service is impeccable. Why is that?
Again, a certain amount of it has to do with the type of people that work there. A lot of people in any one region are not actual denizens of that region and are there maybe for college or just for work, but not to an extent where they need that job. So the younger waiters and waitresses generally don't give a flying crap about you, the city, the province, or anything really... and are there for the buck. If there's no pride in the work then they obviously don't care. People generally don't get fired because as you might have noticed there aren't many managers and such roaming about for quality control, or even much of a "head" waiter or waitress to lead the pack. Lack of accountability and professional standards leads to laziness.
It's something that has grown increasingly worse because at least before the waiters and waitresses didn't complain openly in front of you, bad service or not. Now they make their apathy and disgust so clear that it ruins the food experience a lot of the time, and because there's so many people in China, generally the restaurant won't be short of customers anyway so no one, not even the customers, try to get this corrected.

[Lynnea]

the bright colors of the food match the bright and crazy exterior. So fun! it would be hard to not want to go, too bad about the servers though.

[Kirk]

Hi Jason - We actually found one restaurant in Nanjing where we really wanted to tip, but couldn't.

Hi HH - Thanks for dropping by again and commenting. One ongoing theme when we queried about really bad service/attitude/rudeness.... was the automatic response: "oh, it's because they are not from here!"

Hi Lynnea - It's pretty colorful, huh?