Tao Chicago Review

By Sarah Tong

My friends and I spontaneously decided to go to Tao Chicago for dinner on Friday night. While we did not necessarily have high expectations, we were anticipating a fun, good dinner that would take no more than 2 hours. As much as we were hoping to enjoy it, we came back to campus over 3 hours later disappointed and dissatisfied.

We had a reservation at 7:45 p.m. and were running slightly late, though we had notified the restaurant of our situation. We arrived at 7:55 p.m. and were told to wait to be seated. The waiting area is quite nice: the lighting is warm and dim, and it overlooks the restaurant. We were not seated until 8:20 p.m., despite having a reservation, arriving less than 15 minutes late, and informing the restaurant of our status while we were en route. Already, not a great start.

We were seated in front of the large Buddha statue and the koi pond. We were given menus and then left unattended for several minutes before they brought us water. After that, we waited 15 to 20 more minutes before a server came back to check on us and take our orders. Apparently, they had a mix-up in the back and did not know who was in charge of our table, hence our long wait times. I was now hopeful that the rest of our dinner would go more smoothly with this confusion ironed out.

But after we ordered, we waited for a rather long time (compared to nearly all of the other restaurants I have been to in Chicago) for the food to come, and when it did, we were disappointed. I’m sure the large amounts of waiting added to these negative sentiments, but the food was also not nearly worth the price. I tried the spicy tuna crispy rice, the crunchy spicy yellowtail roll, and the lobster fried rice. The spicy tuna crispy rice was good, but nothing special, and the portions were very small.

The crunchy spicy yellowtail roll was also good, but, again, nothing special. The sushi also did not come with soy sauce, so I had to flag down a server to ask for it, which was a feat in and of itself. And when they brought the soy sauce over, they did not bring a small dish for it, so we had to pour it on our plate.

Later, when we got the lobster fried rice, we had to either scoop it onto a plate covered in soy sauce and wasabi, or try to get a server’s attention again (which was truly proving to be the most difficult task of the night). It took several minutes to catch the waiter's attention. And when I finally tried the lobster fried rice, I was underwhelmed. It was salty and lacked much lobster flavor.

Overall, the combination of poor service and overpriced food made my experience at Tao suboptimal. The portions are very small, and each bite was squarely mediocre. As I mentioned earlier, flagging down a waiter is extremely difficult because they are clearly understaffed and the music is extremely loud. As a small anecdote, the server was in such a rush (even though the food took very long to come) that when they took an empty sushi plate off the table, the entire lump of wasabi fell onto the table and the waiter was gone before they even noticed. When we were ready to leave, we spent around 10 minutes trying to get our waiter’s attention to ask for the check, which was not a great end to the evening.

One additional small observation: the bathrooms are labeled yin and yang, which I found quite confusing. The pictures inside the bathroom are also creepy, in my personal opinion.

As fun as dinner at Tao may seem, I was surprised to find myself disappointed more and more by it throughout my evening there.