T Bowl

Good ginger chicken!

this place just doesn’t cut it. the concept seems great — choose a type of rice (brown or white) and optional meat, then select add-​ins like vegetables and sauce — until you actually eat what you’ve created.
i came here with some co-​workers one day because it was in the vicinity of our workplace. i chose a combination of brown rice with chicken, a couple of different vegetables, and bbq sauce since it was advertised as gluten-​free. the total cost for my meal including a can of soda was between 10 – 15 usd (i can’t remember the total off hand).
when my meal came to the table, it looked nice, but the wow-​factor that i’ve come to enjoy from dining out just wasn’t there. i felt as though i could make the same quality product at home, package it in tupperware and reheat it in my office’s microwave for a fraction of the cost. my dining companions weren’t super impressed with their selections either, but we all agreed that it was passable fare.
unless you’re in the mood for something super basic near penn, don’t bother coming here and instead choose one of the many other options in the area.

I love the concept behind TBowl, and think that with some tweaking it could be great in execution. From reading previous Unilocal reviews, it looks like the owner is responsive to feedback — for example, they’ve got a recycling bin now. I’m hoping they keep listening to customers and improving, because with a few tweaks they could be really great.
The good:
* The food really is FRESH. I love knowing exactly what is going into my food and being able to pick fresh fruits and veggies for my stir-​fry.
* There are a ton of options. They have suggestions for combinations, but you can put together exactly the meal that strikes your fancy.
* The taste and quality. I really enjoyed my meals and think the bubble tea is delicious.
* Ambiance. It’s a nice place to hang out and eat.
* Real dishes and silverware for those dining in. Eco-​friendly, and it’s just nice to eat off some real plates!
What needs work:
* Customer service. I know you’ve got Penn undergrads working here and they are not the easiest people to socialize into a service industry mindset. This is where you need a solid manager who is going to be on your staff to provide good service all the time. What is good service? You make eye contact, you’re friendly, you use the «customer service voice,» you notice when customers are trying to get your attention, you take care of problems quickly. You don’t, say, hide someone’s bubble tea behind a register then have 2 separate employees tell me after 10 minutes that someone will be making it shortly before a third notices it hiding on a counter and points to it.
* Inconsistency in the size of the add-​ins. For a good stir-​fry, the size of the ingredients should be roughly comparable so that things cook at the same speed. The broccoli, peppers, and bok choy in particular need to be cut smaller.
* The rice. I agree with previous reviews that the rice is just dry. It tastes like Minute rice. Also, it’s impossible to eat with chopsticks because it’s not sticky at all.
* Speed. I’m not expecting instant food — I know you’re cooking it fresh, and your 5 – 10 minute estimate is reasonable. I do think there’s room for improvement in the efficiency of your process — why do you have the same person filling out the form for my order, then putting the food in a bowl, then ringing it up, then adding the bizarre step of painstakingly taping my order form to its bowl? Couldn’t this get streamlined somehow?
* Cost. The base price for a bowl of white rice is $ 3.95, add-​ons are 95 cents each (more for proteins). It would be much more reasonable if 2 – 3 veggies were included in the base price.
* Personal pet peeve: the size of the opening on your trash can. If I am going to be dumping the extra food from my bowl into your trashcan before stacking my dishes, it would make my life so much easier if the opening of your trashcan were roughly comparable in size to the bowl I’m trying to scrape into it. Otherwise I am going to make a mess.

I really like the concept of this place so gave it a second try. Second impression was not nearly as bad as the first. They had all ingredients, food was fresh, and the service was much better (still not stellar, but better).

The bubble tea here USED to be good. I have no idea what happened. The last couple of times I came here, the bubble tea has been consistently terrible. Moreover, they are somewhat understaffed and always incredibly slow.

I love bubble tea. I drink a lot of bubble tea. By this logic, I know a thing or two about bubble tea. I don’t think T Bowl makes great bubble tea.
The tea itself was mediocre, just okay. There was little flavor to it. The ice was too much, and the bubbles themselves were sorta few and far between. Overall, not satisfying, a little too expensive, and really not something I wanted to go to again.
Sad.

I want to love this place! Great concept, terrible execution, ridiculously expensive. I really hope some food truck takes this idea and runs with it — there’s no reason food with so few ingredients should take so long and cost so much.

T Bowl deserves an award… for being the biggest insult to Asian cuisine in Philadelphia… this place somehow manages to do the impossible and give you everything you WOULDN’T want to happen to a stir fry. What makes a stir fry good? Well for one thing it uses high quality ingredients, remains unsaturated with oil when flash fried, and has juicy bits of meat scattered in and around the bowl/​rice.
So what does T Bowl do wrong? Let me outline it for you as follows:
1) The chicken is probably the driest piece of meat you could ever sink your teeth into. It sucks the moisture out of your mouth and tastes like it’s been cooked days in advance. I don’t appreciate cotton mouth for lunch.
2) Your stir fry is greasy as HELL. You could probably squeeze out a few ounces if you tilted your plate and fried a few eggs with it.
3) The rice tastes like death. It’s crumbly and old. Whoever made it obviously isn’t getting paid enough.
4) The whole concept is flawed. It’s a fast casual restaurant that has a cool customization theme to the dishes that caters to students and then it overcharges you for everything, to the very last spring onion.
5) The presentation of the dish sucks. It just sucks. Have a little finesse in your presentation. It takes 5 seconds to make the plate look infinitely more appetizing than seeing the oil splashes all around the dish.
6) WTF kind of sauces are you offering? What a terrible range of westernized tastes. Each one attempts to drown out the stale taste of the ingredients (which I suppose was the objective)
This was an even worse business decision than Taglio’s, which actually tasted good on occasion.
I was so excited to hear about this place when it opened, but never have I been more disappointed.
What a shame
¹⁄₅

I like the concept, but the execution needs work. It’s pretty pricey, with a $ 4 base for rice (brown or white) and 95 cents for each vegetable you add, plus $ 2 for a protein (chicken, tofu, etc). Then you pick a sauce and tell them how many scoops of it you want (1, 2, or 3 – I went with 2 and it was way too much). There are signs explaining that each rice bowl is made to order and to please expect a 5 – 10 minute wait. Our wait was significantly longer than that. The staff seemed flustered, and were not overly friendly. When my to-​go order finally came out to me (at the table where I was waiting with my order number on a plackard), it was in a cardboard takeout container that did not seem to be fully closed. The girl hurriedly asked me if I needed a bag. Um… yes. I ordered it to go, and that flimsy cardboard container looks like it’s about to burst open and spill sweet chili ginger sauce all over my work clothes. I made it back to my office without any spillage, thankfully, but with only 10 minutes left of my hour-​long lunch break, thanks to the lengthy wait for my food. The meal itself was decent, but nothing special. The veggies (carrots, broccoli, and bean sprouts) seemed fresh enough, and the grilled tofu had a nice smoky flavor. The two scoops of sweet chili ginger sauce, however, completely overpowered the other ingredients. One scoop would have been plenty, in retrospect. The sauce has a nice sweet/​spicy flavor, which in moderation would have been nice. My food was drowning in it, though, and half an hour later my lips are still burning and I feel vaguely ill from all of the sweetness.
I work in
and am always looking for new and interesting places to eat in the neighborhood, so I’m glad I gave TBowl a try. If they lowered their prices a tad or did something to improve the wait time, I’d probably go back (and be sure to only get one scoop of sauce this time). I don’t mind spending a tiny bit more for quality, healthy ingredients, but I don’t typically go out of my way to spend more at an establishment that doesn’t act like it appreciates my business. (A smile goes a long way, people.) There are a lot of cheaper, faster Asian options nearby, though, and I can’t see myself working this place into the rotation. I intend to try Gia Pronto, which is under the same management and on the same block. I hope the service there is a bit better.

I can’t comment on the food, but the bubble tea is pretty awesome. I was a big fan of Bubble House on Sansom, and was disappointed to see that it had closed. The bubble tea at T Bowl really tastes like fresh tea, and its not too sweet. Only negative was that the tapioca balls were a little too chewy and there were too many of them.

I actually really wanted to try this place, despite all the negative reviews. I don’t understand how it could actually be that bad: it’s rice, vegetables, protein, and sauce. Not a hard concept to mess up. But after eating here for lunch today, I realized how it can get lost.
If anything is worth complaining about at T Bowl, it’s the price. Simply put, it is too expensive. You can see it in the fact that it is always half-​filled compared to its neighboring tenants (Saladworks, Beijing, Gia Pronto), and that when you break down what you pay for, it is absurd. A bowl of rice, just plain old rice, is $ 4 (really, T Bowl? Did you grow the rice overseas yourself and then transport it by foot to West Philadelphia?). Vegetables are 95 cents. Proteins are $ 2. Thank goodness there are some freebies (sesame seeds, chili, garlic, and I think the sauces?). So my rice bowl came out to about $ 11 for a combination of bok choy, broccoli, squash, onions, bean sprouts, and chicken (to compare, I could have received the same amount of veggies and chicken, with even more vegetables, over mixed greens at Houston Hall for about 60% of the cost).
And there’s also the wait, which was about 10 minutes for my food. Really, this is too long for fast food.
But when the food finally arrived, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. The vegetables tasted fresh and crisp. The chicken was moist, albeit a bit flavorless. It was the sauce, my shittake ginger sauce, that was inedible, and if it wasn’t for the copious amount of sriracha that I liberally poured on top of my lunch, I wouldn’t have been able to stomach the dish. But doused in hot sauce, I found the food palatable.
Lastly, I have a bit of a problem with the press placards and restaurant mission that is so proudly displayed inside. They pride themselves on fresh ingredients, on being a locally run business (the owner graduated from Penn both undergrad and grad), and there’s even a picture facing the outside showing him meeting Barack Obama. However, when I wanted to recycle my glass bottle of iced tea, they couldn’t even point me in the direction of a recycling bin. Clearly not entirely sustainable.
In short, T Bowl’s high prices and so-​so food make it hard for me to want to return anytime soon. I find it hard to believe that the rent on the 3700 block of Spruce is as high as they’re making it seem.

I wouldn’t come back for the food which was was absolutely nothing special. The bubble tea was good though.
They were out of many staple veggies including broccoli and string beans. Would have appreciated a proper menu of suggestions. Going free for all makes it likely to make something not as yummy.
I got the grilled tofu as a protien which I thought was good.
Sauces seemed OK. I tried the south African chili sauce and it was mostly heat and a little tomato. The ginger shitake sauce tasted like vinegar. Also for adding in quite a few chilis the stir fry still needed some sriracha.
Water chestnuts tasted strongly of vinegar.
I will say the jasmine milk bubble tea is damn good. But I wouldn’t recommend this place for the food, there must be better options around.
Note, my meal was $ 13 including the bubble tea.

Never mind. Since went back. They lost my order and I waited an inordinate amount of time for them to pile my food into a flimsy to-​go container, which got so hot it nearly burned my hand. The convenience blinded me. Now that I don’t live there…

I rarely write any «1-​star» reviews, but this place is honestly just not cut out to last. The décor is exactly the same as it was when it was a (failed) pizza joint — Taglio. Now the owners are trying again, but this is just not working well. With Sweetgreen a few blocks away, and Gia Pronto and Saladworks up the block, I don’t think TBowl is going to exist for long.
The food is extremely pricey. I paid $ 9 for a fast-​food style bowl of brown ride, spinach, mango, and chicken. I wanted to try a bubble tea, but there were no prices listed, so I said «forget it».
Service was awful. I standed around, attempting to pay for the food I ordered, for about 5 minutes until I finally said «I’d like to pay for my meal» to an attendant standing behind the counter. … There was no order or rhyme/​reason to the way the waiters did their job. I use the term «waiters» loosely. They didn’t even pick up the numbers from our table when we were served, so they sat there on as décor throughout the meal.
When I finally stood up to put my bowl near the trash can, I was disturbed that there were no recycling bins in this restaurant to dispose of the cans and bottles the beverages are bought in.
NO THANK YOU T-​BOWL!

TBowl filled me up with just the lunch I was looking for: plenty of veggies, and some protein (chicken + egg) stir fried with some yummy sauces (chipotle and peppercorn garlic) without rice.
For long I was looking for a place where I could fill myself up with something hot and yet not gorge on rice. Place found!
TBowl is a bit expensive though, if you want to have rice. Rice is $ 4 while each veggie is $ 1 and chicken is $ 2. I think the rice is ridiculously over priced — cmon guys it’s rice. It should be the cheapest.
Alarmingly, the place was empty — I hope this place doesn’t shut down. I would really like to come here once or twice a week. So, for all you people who don’t want to fill up on rice but want a hot, tasty meal, GO!

Disappointing and definitely over priced. The rice was relatively dry, and they were rather careless with the stir fry. I had mushrooms in mine even though I did not order any, and my friend had a few random peanuts. So be careful if you are allergic!
I much rather just eat Chinese food at a food cart, for the price I could get three entrees for the price of one rice bowl.

This place is extremely over-​priced. The reason you go to a place like this, rather than a sit-​down restaurant is to pay less. If the food were amazing, I’d be willing to pay a bit extra, but it was definitely not worth the extra dough. However, if you’re looking for quantity over quality, you may enjoy the free extra rice that they offer.
to top off my Unilocal-​worthy experience, the people that work there definitely don’t make customer service a high priority. I inquired about the pricing, because all three of the people I was there with were confused by their pricing system, and I got a lot of attitude.

I know T Bowl is new, but they need to iron out some of their kinks. The stir-​fry itself isn’t bad. And the ability to make it as healthy or unhealthy as you want is a plus, along with the brown rice and the fresh veggies. Some of the sauce options are a little weird. Some more basic sauce options for a stir-​fry would be nice. But overall, the food was decent.
The main problem is the time that it takes to create the food. It was not crowded when I went in. But because the food was not being produced in a timely fashion, people were just standing around with their numbers. This will need to be fixed quickly, or else it will be a disaster when the place does get crowded. Another problem is their routine for to-​go orders. I know they are trying to be environmentally friendly, but the boxes they are using do not hold up to a stir-​fry. The box is flimsy to begin with, and when you add rice and veggies and sauce to it, the box cannot hold up to the food. These boxes are better for sandwiches. There must be other environmentally friendly options. Finally, as previously mentioned in other reviews, the food is somewhat pricey for a stir-​fry. It added up to 12 dollars before I even knew it!
They have a good concept, but some things need to be worked on in order for me to want to come back.

I’m willing to come back here in the future and upgrade my review… Marco, if you’re reading, please check out my suggestions! This place is a great idea (warm vegetables for lunch: yes please!) and with a few adjustments it could be terrific.
After reading up on Unilocal and City Paper, I decided to give the place a try on it’s opening day. I work right across the street and I walked over at about 11:45. As I was leaving T Bowl, the line was practically out the door. I don’t know if they have the logistics quite worked out yet, because they do move a little slowly for my taste. The people who work here are professional though, and they are willing to let you take your time, since this is your first time here and all. I guess that’s a good thing!
I started with the brown rice. When white rice is all that you can get at all the food trucks round here, it’s a nice change of pace. Of course, you are going to end up shelling out way more here than the average food truck with the price starting at $ 3.95 for the rice and adding up with vegetables at $.95 per scoop and $ 1.95 for your protein. I think the prices are a little high, really.
Here’s my first suggestion: if you’re going to charge me a dollar for spinach, give me more than a teaspoon full! It wilted up to the point where it was basically garnish. I also had the water chestnuts and the chicken which brought me to a grand total of $ 8.42 with tax. Pricey, yes. Was it worth it? Eh, maybe if they hadn’t been so stingy with the sides. The chicken was actually an okay amount (but it was on the dry side). The ginger dressing was yummy, and I asked for 1 and a half scoops because I was worried about it getting too oily after reading the other review.
After you tell them what you want, they take the bowl back to a room where I guess they do the stir-​frying. It would have been nice to see my bowl in action. The amount of rice was good but it was kind of cold. I guess it’s difficult to keep rice warm in that situation, but come on, you’re a rice bowl place! I guess that’s my second suggestion. My third suggestion, which I assume will go ignored, is to lower the prices. Maybe 75 cents per vegetable, or start at $ 3 for the bowl or something. Spending nearly 9 dollars for the amount of food I got was preposterous.

Went to the TBowl sample event today. The first thing that struck me was: EXPENSIVE. The bowl itself was around $ 4 and each ½ cup add in (spinach, mushroom, peas, mango, etc. was $ 1, protein was $ 2). Adds up to around $ 8-​$ 10 for a bowl of stir-​fry. Afterwards, you chose a sauce– the sauces looked like salad dressing, but tasted pretty good. Then they brought the food into the back and stir fried it. The speed was great, décor was fine, but the food… my brown rice/​veggies were submerged in OIL.
The bubble tea was okay– good for being one of the only places to get it.