Tian just opened last September. It's a Korean-Chinese restaurant and supposed to be the third franchise from Centreville, VA.
I went to Tian the first week they opened. As soon as I walked in, I realized that they did spend some money in interior design. Compared to other Korean restaurants interior was better than any other except that the seating arrangement was too tight and felt like one giant cafeteria table. Other customers (total strangers) were only about a foot away from me. That was uncomfortable.
Servers, whew... wasn't trained at all. But it seems like all the Korean restaurants don't emphasize in training their employee about the importance in customer service. No one smiled, no one was being nice. They were all confused and weren't providing customer service. They were just 'delivering' food.
Enough about the service. This is not the first time I had problem with service in Korean restaurants. I also took some pictures of food I ordered.
So we ordered, Jjamppong and Jjajangmyeon Combo called JjamJjamyeon (First word of each dish combined to make a name)
Jjamppong is a spicy seafood noodle soup and Jjajangmyeon(or Jajangmyeon) is a noodle dish with black bean paste (Chunjang) sauce stir fried with veggies and meat. The menu said that they use No MSG, which turned out to be the first good thing about this restaurant since other Korean-Chinese restaurants are known to use a lot of MSG to make Jjajangmyeon tasty. The taste was OK and NOTHING special with noodles (some places make their own hand pulled noodles-if you hear pounding sound back at the Kitchen, they are making your noodles.I don't think Tian makes its own.)
And we ordered, Sachun Tangsuyuk, which was supposed to be a spicy sweet and sour beef (You can choose different meat for this dish. Pork or beef. We chose beef.) We also asked to have sauce on the side so our meat won't get soggy and if we have a leftover, we can take it home. 
Sweet and sour pork/beef is fried, crispy meat and veggies served with sweet and sour sauce. The price was lower than Hanjoongkwan in Ellicott City, MD, another Korean-Chinese restaurant, but it turned out that the serving was smaller too. Only thing I can say about this dish is that I'll NEVER going to order this dish again!!! It wasn't spicy. It wasn't sweet. It was just sour. It didn't have usual veggies in it. Only thing 'floating' in our sauce was some cucumber and scallions?!? I've never seen any restaurant serving sweet and sour sauce with scallions... It's usually cucumbers, some seafood, pineapple, carrots, peppers, onions...etc. Not scallions... I urge you not to order this dish. Please don't.
My first impression of Tian was not good at all. Too busy with untrained servers, who were obviously confused, and weird dishes that failed to impress me. However this was MY only first experience. I've heard better things from other people. Some people say that the regular Tangsuyuk is OK and that some people actually like their noodle dishes too, because Tian doesn't use MSG. Maybe I'll go try the regular Tangsuyuk next time too. I hope they don't have scallions floating around again...
If you want to try it yourself, Tian (티엔) is located near Lotte in Ellicott City, MD. If you go, please tell us what it was like.
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