Dazzling Cafe - Richmond

After a long week of hard work, my friend H and I decided to treat ourselves. H had been working 12-hour days for 5 or 6 days a week, while I had been working slightly less. We decided to go to Dazzling Cafe. We arrived at 6PM, just in time for the end of their Happy Hour menu (which starts at 3PM, I believe). The server was kind enough to let us order from the Happy Hour menu, where each dish was under $10 and drinks could be customized for an additional cost. I opted for a milk tea with pearls ($0.50) and H chose an iced longan tea ($2.00), which he enjoyed. The pearls were good, but not as great as Gongcha's. We ordered pesto chicken spaghetti and mussel risotto, although the dish with mussels in the photo turned out not to be risotto.

The ambience of this cafe is quite cute and overall very clean. The food was a semi let down, the pizza was very thin and not much topping. But the rice and noodle dishes were yummy in flavour but the portions were small and not enough ingredients. The thing that I did love was their green tea waffle there was that nice bitter essence to the green tea like the real flavour from Japan and the waffle was nice and crunchy/soft interior. Overall, it's a great place to chat with your girl friends and have a quick snack but not a place to bring your guy friends that prefer a heavier meal :

First time trying this new chic cafe in Richmond. Everything looks so fancy here. Service was good. The drinks were average, the food were tasty but not as salty as we wanted them to be. The servers really cares about how we feel about the food when we wanted to get salt and pepper, they asked to see if there is anything wrong with the Taste of the food. Their dessert looks luxurious and tastes very good. We both like their dessert better than the main course.

Dazzling cafe is a franchise from Asia that has expanded to Canada in Toronto and the most recent location in Richmond.<br/ <br/ Had to make reservations and the earliest seating I got was 230 pm. They welcome walk ins but they were told it would be a 30-40 minute wait.<br/ <br/ Decor is classy, elegant and chic. Service was friendly.<br/ <br/ Minimum spend per person is one food order and a drink. Wasn't a huge fan of that as prices are above average. There was a drink promo of 20% off so that was a bonus. Overall food was good..great focus on presentation but don't expect large portions. Highlights were the Mentaiko Spaghetti with cream sauce and the Smoked duck pizza. They are famous for their honey toast boxes. The Mont Blanc $15) Chestnut) was nice and light and it wasn't too sweet. We also ordered the strawberry waffle with added mochi for an extra $2. That took FOREVER. The server did warn us about the wait but 40 minutes for a waffle was just absurd. <br/ <br/ Would I go back? Unsure..it was great to try it out but just didn't feel super WOW'd. Bill for 4 came to $110..and we didn't come out full.

Generally I try to not leave restaurant Tripadvisor reviews in my own city unless it's part of my recommendation list for when you visit Vancouver but I can't help but post this up as I would hate for anyone to get the same experience I got at this place. You're really better off eating at another place since there's so many other great locations to eat at in the Richmond and Vancouver area. The following review is a repost of a review I left on Yelp: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Firstly to begin this review I must say, I did not read the reviews about this place beforehand...Finally got a chance to come here with some friends since we had an early dinner. I've tried this place out when I was in Taipei so I wasn't over the top about coming to try this place out but my friends wanted to come so why not? We came about an hour before they closed and the place was relatively packed so we were expecting to wait but we got seated within 10 mins of our arrival. We got seated near their washrooms and was given a two-person table with an added chair (since we had three people) but it was spacious enough that one person even got to sit on the "throne" so chair space wasn't bad. Since we ate dinner prior to coming here and really just wanted to try out their desserts, we ordered two toast boxes to share amongst the three of us. The food came and was presented as photogenically as posted by everyone else. And here is where the night goes downhill.... the order for the last call comes and our waitress named A came to inform us about the last call. We said we had nothing to order but she said that there was a minimum order so we would need to order something else. So going with her word, we kindly asked her for the menu to see what else we could order. We were going to settle to ordering a drink since we had already gotten 2 toastboxes so we flagged down a waiter and asked him to order us a milk tea that we saw posted at their bar. The waiter informed us that we could not order the milk tea since it's actually part of the Dazzling Express menu which they don't serve for people seated inside the restaurant. Since this was the case and we were beyond full at this point, we asked him to clarify the restaurant policy about a minimum order because we were not informed about it when we got seated and neither was it written on the inside of the menu; YES, we checked. The waiter said that there was no minimum order policy. Of course after going back to our toastboxes and trying to enjoy the rest of our night, our waitress A comes back and asks us whether we've decided on ordering yet. We inform her that we're not ordering anything else. She once again states that there's a minimum order and we quickly tell her that one of the staff members that we just talked to said there was no such policy and she immediately says "Who said? Who told you? Which one?", when we mention that one of the servers did (since they're all wearing the same uniform), she storms off to the kitchen window. Guess she was done with us that night because a different waitress came to give us our bill and coincidentally, there was a comments sheet inside the bill. Let's just say we let some few words about our experience and the differences in restaurant knowledge on their minimum or no minimum order policy. Aside from the service, the toastboxes were just ok. Guess you shouldn't expect too much when you're ordering toastboxes but we sort of expected the insides to be filled with ingredients as opposed to cut of pieces of toasts. It was definitely a mistake to get two toastboxes after a dinner meal as they're very heavily filled with ice cream and whip cream. They're worth it for the picture but there's better dessert options to waste your calories on. Overall, I think waitress A ruined the entire experience. Would definitely not come back to be waited on by her. I can understand if you're having a bad day but the words and tone that she used made it seem as it we were accusing her of lying to us about the minimum order policy. To clarify with the horrible experience, it wasn't until I went home and read some reviews on this place by fellow Yelpers that I realized that this place DOES indeed have a minimum order policy. I think our experience would have been fine if 1. it was mentioned at the very beginning when we were seated, 2. if they have this written on the menu and 3. if the response from staff members were the same.