Twin Tails
Shops at Columbus Circle · New York · what guests are saying on Yelp,
Source: Yelp reviews → Postgres · public reviews · generated 2026-06-28
Dazzling Debut Cools as the Check Climbs
Each dot is a review, placed by date and star rating. The amber line is the running average across all reviews to date. Twin Tails opened to near-rave numbers in late 2024 (a 4.55 quarterly average) and peaked around 4.6 in spring 2025, before settling into the low-4.4s through late 2025 and 2026 as a steady drumbeat of complaints about price, consistency, and slipping service pulled the curve down.
Highlights & insights
Read across all reviews. Guests almost unanimously fall for the room, the duck, and the dessert, yet the same diners increasingly flag steep prices, uneven cooking, and service that no longer matches the setting.
The dishes guests actually name
How often each item is mentioned across the reviews, and the lean of that mention.
- The Cho Lon Duck is the headliner. It's the dish reviewers come for and the one they push hardest on others, from a flat "Get the Duck!!!" to praise that it eats "like Peking duck" and arrives "so juicy and tender" with three sauces and a portion one waitress flagged as "equivalent to 2 entrees."
- The room does the heavy lifting. Diners call the space "luxe and opulent" and "a whole vibe," repeatedly invoking Buddakan and the "spectacular view overlooking Columbus Circle" and Central Park as reason enough to book.
- Dessert closes strong. The pandan-pistachio soufflé and mango sticky rice are habitual highlights, with one group calling the soufflé "probably the best dish of the night" and others begging you to "don't skip dessert."
- Service, at its best, is memorable. When the floor clicks, it really clicks: one regular said it was "probably the best we've received in years," and named servers like Aliyah, Denisa, and Hugh recur in five-star write-ups for being attentive without overselling.
- The cocktail program wins over skeptics. Even diners cool on the food concede the drinks land, with one calling them "the bright spot," and fans singling out the riffed lychee martini and the Thai-tea-laced Phuket Swizzle.
- Prices draw the loudest backlash. Sticker shock is the single most common gripe, from "$17 for a side of rice!" and a "$52 chicken pad Thai" to a table of "4 people, no alcohol, OVER $500!" that felt nothing was "special" enough to justify it.
- It can read as vibe over food. Multiple guests frame it as a scene first, with one writing "you go more for the vibe than the food" and another that "the food alone wouldn't pull me back."
- Consistency wobbles plate to plate. Reviews describe meals as "hit or miss," with recurring notes that dishes ran "quite salty," duck arrived "dry and somewhat room temperature," and a second bowl of coconut rice came "OVERSWEET to a point you would Think is coconut rice pudding."
- Service has slipped from the opening standard. From mid-2025 onward the detailed failures pile up: a six-time regular wrote "the service has steadily declined" after having to "grab my own bottle of wine," while others logged hour-long waits past their reservation and a check charged to the wrong card.
- It gets loud. Sound is a repeat complaint, with one table seated near a party of ten "trying to talk above blasting music" and another saying the food was "excellent but way too loud" to hear each other.
The praise is for the experience, not strictly the plate.
Across rating tiers, even happy guests separate the setting from the cooking, conceding "you're paying for the experience more than the food." The duck and dessert aside, many describe the menu as "above average but not super memorable" Asian fusion. The room, the view, and the buzz are doing real work to carry the check.
Service is the swing vote on the rating.
The food and design draw consistent praise even in low scores, so the stars rise or fall almost entirely on the floor. A six-visit regular dropped to two stars purely on service, and another wrote "food was great, but wouldn't be coming back based on the service." Tightening hospitality is the fastest lever back toward the opening-month numbers.
Authenticity expectations are a built-in trap.
Guests arrive expecting Thai or Vietnamese and meet an upscale fusion, which several native diners flag directly, one noting it's "more of a south asian inspired restaurant" than Vietnamese. The Quality Branded pedigree (Bad Roman, Zou Zou's) and the Shops at Columbus Circle mall address set a high, hype-driven bar that the kitchen is then judged against.
Connecting a review to its check
Because the OpenTable reservation book carries the guest's name, we can match a reviewer to their reservation — and then to the itemised POS check from that visit. Every match shown is then verified against the order itself: a dish or drink the review names has to actually appear on the check, so a generic name collision or a wrong visit is filtered out. Below are the reviews that pass that bar. Click one to open the actual order.
Name-verified matches
Unlike a dish-only guess, these link the reviewer's name in the reservation book to the check — so a review becomes a real, itemised order: what they spent, what they ordered, who served them.
How to read confidence: a match is strongest when the reviewer's name is uniquely present in the reservation book within the weeks before the review and the party size lines up. Common names with several candidate visits score lower.
Twin Tails · Reviews & Insights · internal · figures from live Yelp + POS data