Lang 3 restaurant and bar in Da Nang: Just an awful experience

I have walked past this place many times and just ignored it because it didn't appear to be terribly open most of the time. When a friend of mine and myself couldn't think of anything in particular to eat for lunch one day. We were walking down past Lang 3 and noticed what appeared to be a staff member on the upper floor so we asked them if they are a restaurant and if they are open. The answer to both of these questions was "yes" so since we didn't really have any particular type of food in mind we decided to give it a try.

Almost immediately we realized we had made a terrible mistake by deciding to dine there.

From the outside the place looks nice enough, it is actually a lot fancier looking than most of the places around here. It has the appearance of a place that would be mid-range dining and the menu would indicate this as well.

The first thing that irritated me was that there is this particular sort of style of server at restaurants that exist all over the place. The waiter brought over the menus and then just stood there as if we were going to be able to immediately figure out what we wanted. This is just due to lack of training and I try to be nice about it but I actually had to ask him to "go away for a little while" so that we could look the menu over.

Then when I motioned for him to come back, and I did this politely because I am not a jerk, we ordered drinks which were an iced coffee and some sort of fruit drink. Then the guy just stood there AGAIN. I politely asked him to go and get the drinks and we would order food when he came back. He complied but this is something I really find irritating because this is basically waiter-ing 101 as far as the skill set is concerned.

Things got worse because it took absolute ages, probably more than 15 minutes to just make 2 drinks. The place was not busy either and I only noticed one other customer in the entire establishment. I find this an unacceptable amount of time to have to wait for beverages.

Things got worse when basically the only thing on the menu that I was at all interested in, the cream cheese salmon dip appetizer, was not available. I wanted to scream out "son of a bitch!" but instead I just exhaled, had a sip of my iced coffee and just ordered the fish and chips. Fish and chips is such a common dish here in Da Nang that is a go-to for any place that you don't know anything about. I unenthusiastically ordered it and as expected, it took around 30 minutes for them to prepare it. Me and the person I was there with had already decided that this wasn't going to be lunch but just a snack at this point because the place had let us down so much already, so quickly.

This is what we ended up with. I had a difficult time initially figuring out which one of the two fried things was the fish and which was the chips. I jest of course but just look at that fish! It's pathetic.

The pieces of fish were so thin that they had exactly zero flavor. It tasted like I was eating just batter with nothing inside of it. It was disgusting and even though there were 2 of us there, we didn't even finish this one small plate of food. They somehow managed to overcook half of the chips and undercook the other half as well. The little salad thing there just tasted like a bowl of mayonnaise. There was no redeeming quality about anything that was on that plate. Even the tartare sauce was obviously something that came out of a jar from a local minimart.

To add insult to injury, this place is also significantly more expensive than other restaurants in the area and they had a "service charge" built in at 15% as well, which was not indicated anywhere in the menu.

All I can say is that if you want to be irritated instead of satisfied at a place to have some food then by all means head over to Lang 3 in Da Nang. I've been to some shocking restaurants in this town with very bland food but the combination of incompetent staff, absurd wait times on preparation, very poor quality food, and the fact that the place is more expensive than surrounding area restaurants means that I will definitely never return to this establishment.