Fu Lin Restaurant

Maybe Google should consider allowing you to give a restaurant negative stars. This would be appropriate for Fu Lin. When writing a food review, I ALWAYS try to find something positive to say about the place. There is nothing positive to say about my visit to this place for lunch. I visited just before 11:30 with one colleague. As we went in, there were only a few others there and we sat at a table. After about 5 minutes we got up to look at a menu, as no one had been to our table. The server assumed we'd eat the buffet, but after looking it over and finding only two entrees (triple delight and onion chicken) we decided to check out the menu. When we were looking at our menus the waitress/cook/hostess seemed to be frustrated by our non-buffet habits. We decided rather than to put extra inconvenience on her, we'd just eat the buffet and deal with it. The rice was hard and dry, the soup had a film almost a half inch thick on it. When I got a cup of egg-drop soup and took it to my table I tasted it and it was freezing. The woman saw I was eating it and said it was not ready. Apparently I'd eaten what the staff left on the bar the night before. Apparently they leave the soup urns in overnight and clear them the next day. They should have done this before serving customers. Overall the food was horrible and the service nonexistent. While we were there two more staff members showed up, now to a more full house of customers. Rather than helping out and getting refills for our drinks that had sat empty for most of our visit, they got plates of food and began eating and playing with their psp. I went to the waiter's station and filled my own drink and got a nasty look from one of the two sitting down eating his meal. He then got up and started walking the floor trying to do a few things. This place is a joke. I think if it weren't for their proximity to UCA they'd be gone in a minute.

Ordered pepper steak (D6), Sweet & Sour Pork (D10), side of Pork Chow Mein (26) - (both combos come with pork fried rice & an egg roll), and we ordered a Teriyaki Chicken appetizer. Sooo.... Pepper Steak: not a single grain of pepper to be found (or tasted) in any of the about seven or eight count shards of undercooked, cold, and oddly sweet tasting "beef", but got loads of onion and bell pepper quarters. Next, the Sweet & Sour Pork. Oh boy. So the watered down "sweet/sour" sauce tasted like it came from a can at the dollar store, and comes separate from the battered pork (which alone wasn't bad at all). If you expect to see any sign of pineapple in S&S pork (as I suspect most of us Americans have), don't bother looking. There is zero anything but a bright red liquid. Next up, the Pork Chow Mein. Don't know what to say... Vegetable soup most closely described it, with a side of those crispy things you mix into a pre-packaged "mexican salad". Fried taco strips perhaps? Can't comment on taste, wasn't in the mood for chunky vegetable soup (like the peppered beef; mostly quartered onions and bell peppers. The Teriyaki Chicken. Thank the lord, it looked and tasted as you would expect. Actually, give it a solid 7 on the 1-10 scale, and we ate all of it (it was the only thing that was). Finally, the fried rice and egg rolls: Egg rolls were raw and "pasty" inside. Gross scale; a 10. The fried rice was also undercooked for my taste, but if you like semi-crunchy rice, you'll love it. Side note, my wife did call the restaurant seeking some kind of "closure" (or explanation) about the chow mein "soup" not containing a single egg noodle, but apparently it's all made to "traditional" standards. (I guess traditional Chinese love wrong orders, canned sauces, undercooked meat, and food without any spices whatsoever... who knew?). All in all, the fortune cookies were the best part, which is pretty ironic.