Why I Will Never Eat At Sino Again.

So it was my mom's 70th birthday last week, and to celebrate this momentous occasion, my sister, brother and I had a wonderful weekend planned for her. A nice dinner with just the family on Friday, and then game night with friends on Saturday. As mom said, it was the perfect plan.

If you know my mom, you know that she loves appetizers. She's known for filling up on appees before the main course is served, and is just fine with that, thank you. So my sister and I thought Sino would be a a great choice, since they serve small plates and mom could get lots of different dishes to try. So my sister made reservations for 8 at 7:30 PM on Friday through Open Table. She even put, "Celebrating Mom's 70th birthday" in the Special Requests for the Maitre D' box.

I case you don't know, this is what Open Table is, per their website:

When you book a table on OpenTable.com, your reservation is instantly recorded in the restaurant's computerized reservation book - the same one the restaurant's host uses to track all reservations. (It's the black terminal you may see when you arrive at the restaurant.)

Unlike other "online" reservation services which rely on faxes or table allocations, OpenTable has live Internet connections into the restaurants themselves. So restaurant availability information is up-to-date, and your reservations are confirmed.

My dad being the obsessive early bird that he is, we arrived at the restaurant about ten minutes early. We checked in and were told to come back when our entire party had arrived, and that they were just waiting for our table to clear. So as soon as my sister got there - right at 7:30 - we went back up to the hostess. They comment on how the enormous and beautiful flower arrangement my sister gave my mom was as big as she was, and we told them we were there to celebrate her 70th birthday. They told her happy birthday (lies!), and we were given a pager and now told that they "were just setting our table up". So we go outside to wait as the bar is crazy crowded.

10 minutes pass. Lots of people are walking in and getting tables. We have not.

Another 10 minute pass. We see a Sino employee outside having a smoke (yuk). My sister goes in to check on our table. Once again the hostess tells her they are "just setting it up". We are concerned that their employees are too dumb to know how to set up a table, but were tricked by the word "just" and continue to wait.

10 more minutes pass. It is now 8:00 and mom is irritated and hungry. So my sister goes back in and comes out a few minutes later and tells us they are missing a chair (what???), but to bring us all in. So we all go in and continue to stand around the hostess desk for a few minutes, when my mom, miss prissy pants, decides to go up there and tell the hostess that it is inexcusable to have us wait 30 minutes when we had a reservation.

This is when it gets good. So then the hostess tells us they don't actually take reservations, that using Open Table is similar to calling ahead, and that you are basically behind all the people that have already put their names down. So once you get there, even though you have made a reservation, you still have to wait behind all the other people that arrived at the restaurant before you.

Okay, I want to repeat that. Sino does not take reservations. Using Open Table, an online reservation service does not mean you have a reservation. Even when the restaurant calls you the day before to confirm your reservation - which is exactly what they did. No where on their Open Table page does it say they don't take reservations. Confused? So were we.

So my mom asks to speak with the manager, who incidentally turned out to be the same guy we saw having a smoke out front (apparently his cigarette was more important then finding his customers a chair). He comes over with this totally patronizing, "What seems to be the problem? Your table is ready now." Umm yeah... over 30 minutes later. No thank you.

So we told them we were leaving.

My sister reiterated how stupid it was that they had someone call to confirm our reservation that apparently did not exist. He told us it will be "very hard" to find a table for 8 in Santana Row at that time. We didn't care. We left.

We all discussed and decided to call our local sushi joint, Furu-Sato, to see if they could seat us. They said not a problem, that they would set up the table right then. As soon as we walked in they all greeted us warmly, gave mom the royal treatment all night, and we were happy to give them our hundreds of dollars rather than Sino. As mom and dad said, it was meant to be.

And now I will tell everyone I know that Sino has probably the worst customer service of any restaurant I have ever been to and I will never go there again.