Due to circumstances beyond my control, I had to change the plans I’d made for my wife and I to celebrate her birthday on Sunday. We didn’t have a lot of time and had to be in Queens, so I decided to go with Ganey Orly for lunch.
What we ordered: A bowl of Lagman each, a Samsa each, one order of Manti to share, a small Achik Chuchuk to share, and an order of Plov to share.
We both loved the Lagman. It was full of vegetables and the noodles added perfectly to a unique flavor. The Samsa wasn’t as well received by my wife. She didn’t like the flavoring of the filling as much as I did. I also thought that the texture was extraordinary. The Manti has the same filling, so my wife was also out on those. I thought they were OK, but I’ve had better Manti. The Achik Chuchuk was good and well-sized for the price and we both enjoyed it. The Plov was very good, though there was an extremely low meat to rice ratio. It was basically a plate of rice with a couple of pieces of meat on top.
The positive: The place was clean, most of our food came out pretty quickly (though the Manti took 40 minutes which made no sense), and the prices are great.
The negative: They were out of several menu items due to food having gone bad because of a refrigeration problem. Not their fault, and the manager came over and was up front about it. Our waiter was a train wreck. He forgot to bring us water at the beginning and still had not brought it out until we reminded him after we’d received our soup. There was only one other table of customers and my wife could see him sitting in the corner on his phone the whole time. He regularly forgot to clear one of our courses even though he cleared the other person’s plate. He would take our silverware with the small plates we were using, but not bring a replacement so we had nothing to eat with until we asked for new forks. He took forever to come back to get the check. He was wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants.
I know these things get discussed all the time around these parts, but they had a note on the menu that said “All parties pay a 12% service charge, all parties over 6 people pay a 18% service charge.” This was a little weird because I don’t think I’ve ever tipped less than 15%. So even though our waiter was awful, I was going to tip on top of the service charge. I think they should just make everyone pay 15%, if they’re determined to make the tip mandatory.
In the end, I’d say we were both disappointed, though I liked the food better than she did.
Nati Burnside 