Chef Bao’s

There are some circumstances that are beyond my comprehension: How do hadrons give other particles mass? How was George W. Bush elected President twice? How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck COULD chuck wood? And, why does Chef Bao’s have such a low rating?
My wife and I went to the address looking for Lao Hunan, a restaurant I had visited back in 2012 and loved. After starting confusedly at the address for a while, I realized that Lao Hunan had unfortunately closed (or, perhaps, moved). We were headed to Lao Sze Chuan when my wife decided we should turn back around, as she thought the menu looked fine and the restaurant was reasonably busy.
That was a good choice.
Walking in, it was clear that this was Lao Hunan. From my memory, I recognized the same portrait gallery of Hunanese persons on the wall, along with other décor. Also, the menu was very, very similar – almost as if the same cooks took over the restaurant from the Lao group. (A similar situation happened where I went to law school. Virginia has been graced with the culinary goodness of a man named Peter Chang. For years, he would open up Hunanese-​Sichuan restaurants across Northern and Central Virginia, but never put his name on them. One of them – Taste of China, in Charlottesville – was eventually taken over by other people. The menu looks similar to his other restaurants, but it’s under different ownership. Many – including one of my Chinese classmates – swears that Taste of China is better than Peter Chang’s current restaurants. Eventually, Peter Chang settled down and has his own self-​named restaurants, which are excellent.)
My wife and I ordered the Sichuan hot pot. The double Sichuan hot pot contained two different broths: one with chilis, and one without. For protein, it came with basically everything imaginable: beef, chicken, beef balls, chicken balls, prawn, prawn balls, various mushrooms, tripe, fish, tofu, broccoli, tofu skin, mussels, et cetera, et cetera. Thankfully, our waitress took the time to explain the cooking time for each item.
If you couldn’t tell by the review so far, the food was great.
Also great was the service: Friendly, responsive.
tl;dr: Go here.

Food was very good. Menu is interesting and creative. Service was friendly and attentive. But the overall experience was not particularly pleasant.
There are way too many tables crammed to the space, and dining was claustrophobic. The place was very noisy, and that would have been a problem even if there had not been several tables of children screaming nonstop at the top of their lungs. Might be a good place to get carry out, but I would not eat there again. I could not wait to get out of the place.

We had 3 dishes: the jade tofu, sichuan style green beans and your fried noodles (basically veggie fried lo-​mein). The green beans were edible but not right. The lo-​mein had chicken in it which I would think even a bad restaurant can at least get your order right but were just shy of inedible. It had to much soy sauce not much other flavor, almost no veggies and chicken doused in so much soy sauce it didn’t have much taste other than salty. The jade tofu was awful, absolutely dismal, I don’t even know what they were trying to do. We also tried pork with chayote squash which was also terrible. I don’t know how you can ruin chayote squash because it’s pretty delicious just sautéed with some oil and salt and pepper but this was over peppered and over cooked. The pork tasted sketchy like it was going off. We left it was so bad even though I was starving and had just gotten to the city from a road trip. In addition when I went to pay they claimed their card machine wasn’t working and asked to take my number and run it later. Um no, seemed scammy. Now I feel sick, hope I don’t have food poisoning. Terrible experience.