UYE: Buford Highway #60 at Good Luck Gourmet

What a first UYE for me! FREE! I felt like it as an official Unilocal event.
Good Luck Gourmet = Good Luck Getting Our Meal
Food was on point, so I’ve gotta give them that. I felt a little pressure to speak up in Mandarin but, well, it was my first UYE and I didn’t want to disappoint Unilocalers with food that I thought would be tasty but ended up. Not.
Daniel couldn’t have helped the bad service any more than he did. Well, maybe he could have done more than bringing us rice and water and napkins. Maybe bus the table a little more, too. Jk you’re always awesome, Daniel B!
Food was great and I was so excited when one of my favorite dishes of all time was ordered. 梅菜扣肉 is da bomb, though.
I did have a lot of fun getting to know the Unilocalers around me, and it was great sitting up close to Colleen! Thanks for dinner, Colleen!
Sadly, I won’t be able to make it to the next Buhi UYE but that’s not going to stop me from coming back for more!
By the way, does this mean we’re going to have to start reviewing ALL UYE’s?

First of all, Daniel is a great host/​planner and throws excellent UYEs! They are a hot commodity and you have to respond within the first few hours if you want to get on without being wait-​listed! (In fact, I think this is the first time I’ve managed to do so). Don’t give up hope if you are wait-​listed though — people’s plans change and you can often still get in. I was looking forward to this one, as I generally love Chinese food, but had never had Shaanxi cuisine before and was interested to try it.
Daniel, as always, was super organized. He had already prepared a list of items that his half of the table was going to order. While our half was initially working on our own list, in the interest of simplicity we decided to let Daniel order everything x 2. I wasn’t worried, because Daniel is basically a connoisseur of pretty much every type of food, so I would trust him to order for me any day ;-). The list sounded pretty good — and it was! Everything that came out was delicious… When it eventually came out, that is. As others have said, the service was really really slow. But Daniel, being the good host he is, did his best to keep following up with the waitstaff to make sure we all got what we needed, coming by to check on our side of the table (it was a long table), etc. I won’t let the poor service colour my view of Daniel’s event, because he certainly made it a good experience in spite of that. Good company helps too, of course. And, you know, the fact that Unilocal ended up footing the bill (which is not typical).
I won’t be able to make his next event, but I look forward to others to come!

Am I reviewing the restaurant or Daniel? Daniel pretty much worked for the restaurant getting people their drinks and silverware. Oh, and he pretty much chose the dishes for everyone too. Food was good, probably ordered a tad too much. The service, minus Daniel, sucked. A lot. Probably won’t come back, especially since I can’t really eat Szechuan food.

Buford Highway UYE #60 was held this past Friday, October 2, 2015 at Good Luck Gourmet in Doraville. We had a special guest at this UYE (Unofficial Unilocal Event). Unilocal Southeast Regional Director Colleen B, Jonathan and Kellie’s boss, was in town from Orlando and decided to join in on the festivities! Not only that, but Unilocal OTP Community Manager Kellie M and her husband Ralph M made it out as well, so we had both a Regional Director and a Community Manager at the event. In my experience, in the post-​Kathleen era, it’s not often a CM will make it out to a UYE (granted, we have a *ton* of UYEs in metro Atlanta and a CM coming to a UYE has been compared to an employee coming into work on their day off), so it was a real treat to have these guys.
Colleen is also one of the team leads for Unilocal’s ACRONYM Council (
). UYEs were discussed at the ACRONYM Summit at Unilocal HQ in March. I was very happy Colleen was able to make it out to her very first Buford Highway UYE, a monthly series I’ve kept going since November 2010. It was also the first Buford Highway UYE for Jacqueline C, Tiff H, and Sarah D. It was Kellie and Ralph’s second.
We had perfect attendance (20 of 20 people showed up) which is rare. Thanks to everyone who RSVP’ed (
) and showed up including Colleen, Jackie, Ralph, Kellie, Rachel K, Tiff, Marty J, Sean L, Will S, Kayre H, her +1 Eddie, Vivian W, Mike Y, Trevor W, Sarah, Andrew P, Randy T, Jang, and Vyvy T. Shout-​out to Will, who flew in from Dallas (TX) earlier in the day just to be at the UYE, and Trevor, who got into a car accident on the way to the UYE and still made it. What dedication!
I chose Good Luck Gourmet because it’s a relatively new restaurant. It opened April 2015 in the old Gu’s Bistro space. Jang and others suggested we do a BuHi UYE here so I put it on the calendar for October. Good Luck Gourmet serves Shaanxi cuisine from Northwest China as well as Sichuan cuisine like Gu’s Bistro once served.
I made a reservation with the restaurant and the staff set aside a long table for 20 in their semi-​private, elevated dining room. That was cool. I made a list on my phone of dishes I wanted to try. Originally, I had planned for each half of the table to order their own set of dishes and dine family-​style. However, to make things easier on the visibly stressed staff, I ended up ordering for the entire table. We indulged on Shaanxi Style Cold Noodles, Chengdu Style Dumplings with Red Oil, Red Oil Pig Ears and Belly Slices, Xi’an Steamed Mutton and Flat Bread Soup, Chongqing Style Spicy Chicken, Preserved Vegetable Steaming Pork, Spicy Dried Eggplant, Cumin Lamb, Snow Pea Leaves, Steaming Crisp Pork, Crispy Shrimp, noodles, rice, and more. It was a lot of food.
The food was great, but the service was abysmal. As I’ve read online and heard from others, the waitstaff consisted of just a brother and sister duo. When I originally called to make our reservation, I asked if 20 was an appropriate party size and I was told it was. In fact, the server actually told me I could bring more if I wanted. Skeptical, I capped the reservation at 20 to be on the safe side. I called the restaurant again less than a week before our dinner to confirm our reservation and the staff assured me they would be ready for us.
What Jang wrote in his review is right. If you went to Good Luck Gourmet this past Friday night regardless of your party size, you were in store for some slow-​as-​molasses service. The staff, both in the kitchen and out in the dining room, need help badly! I had to get up many times throughout the night to fetch a server, remind them about forgotten dishes and drinks (they forgot Marty’s water three times, haha), and finally started doing things myself like almost going back into the kitchen to fill a water pitcher and glasses, and grabbing steamed rice and extra napkins for the table. Marty and Kellie kindly helped do a bit of bussing too (thanks, you two). When most of the other parties had finished and left for the night, the dining room was a sea of uncleared tables with dirty dishes galore. It was a sight to behold and evidence the business was understaffed.
In the end though, we had a good time enjoying each other’s company and were pleasantly surprised when Colleen announced that she/​Yelp would pick up the tab. WOW. That was a first. Thank you very much, Colleen and Unilocal!
Note: «Unofficial Unilocal Event» is now a category you can select when creating or editing a business listing on Unilocal.Colleen told us about this new feature at the UYE and created the business listing for this UYE as an example.

This is one of the best UYEs I’ve been to. Being a resident UYE organizer myself, I know what it’s like to do UYEs. It’s hard work. It’s like herding cats. Then you have to contend with people coming late, not coming at all (even if they RSVPed), or randomly showing up to the event. Not only that, you have to deal with the restaurants. It’s a thankless job that people take for granted.
So now we have #59 Buford Hwy UYE at Lucky Gourmet. You can say I was lucky to get included into this exclusive UYE. Daniel’s UYEs are hard to get into. Even Jeremy Stoppelman would get into the wait list if he wasn’t fast enough to RSVP.
This UYE was special. Colleen the boss lady came by along with Kellie. No wonder Kellie was behaving so professionally. She was being prim and proper like she was in Downton Abbey or something.
We got a long table that fit everyone, barely. Having a long table sucks because you can’t really converse with everyone. But it’s okay. I liked having Sean L. Vyvy T., Marty J., Randy T., Will S., and Daniel B. around me to talk to. They are interesting people. It’s too bad I wasn’t close to Colleen because she would’ve been fun to talk to as well.
We ordered about 10 dishes. Daniel B. had a list that he already drew up before he came. Our side of the table was about order different things, but to make things easier, we decided to get Daniel to order double of everything.
That was a good and a bad idea. It made things less complicated. But we didn’t get some of the dishes our side wanted like Mapo Tofu and Fish in Chili Oil. It’s okay. The food was still amazing though.
The service sucked though. It’s not because of our huge group either. That place seems understaffed. No matter if you went with 4 people or 15, you would’ve probably had the same experience. But that’s par for the course for most Northern Chinese restaurants. You have to deal with crappy service sometimes.
The food took a long time to get and sometimes, the servers forgot our requests like waters, bowls, drinks, etc. It’s okay. Daniel, being the good host that he is, made sure the servers did not forget what we wanted. Also Marty, Kellie, and others helped out bus the table when our dirty dishes piled up. We should’ve tipped them!
In the end, we had another surprise. Colleen covered the entire bill! Unilocal is so nice. I should invite her to my UYEs at Bacchanalia. So thank you Unilocal for a great meal in Shanxi Chinese cuisine.

Horrible. Daniel took forever to refill water and bring rice. I never even got my tea cup. Rice bowl? Nope. Had to use soup bowl.