Mystery Critic

Overall
Food
Service
Ambience
Value

I'm starting to sound like a seafood expert but I REALLY am not....  But I can't help but to notice that these Chinese seafood restaurants in Southland are SO GOOD....  This place is more than seafood too.  If you appreciate good food - doesn't matter which ethnicity - you're gonna love this restaurant.

FOOD

This is a seafood place - you almost won't go wrong if you order a table full of seafood.  There is one dish that you will find on everyone's table - salt and pepper crab.  Given that this is California and it is a Chinese restaurant, crabs are everywhere; however, we're talking August!  You know when a restaurant knows seafood - if they can come up with a great crab dish in the middle of summer.  BUT, there's another secret - the house specialty whole fish.  It's (I think) first steamed then boiled in seasoned stock, makes it both tender and flavorful. 

The meat dishes are good too - be sure to get the appetizer combo which is quite authentically Chao-Zhou.  It has a real succulent sliced duck breast.  I would avoid the typical dishes - like sweet and sour ribs and walnut scripy shrimp - at all cost because even though they are ok, you'd be wasting your stomach space.

NOTE - Ethnic Chao-Zhou (northern Guang-Dong) cuisine is pretty easy to find - at least a ton of restaurants claim to make it.  Truly authentic and top-quality ones are extremely hard to find though.  If you can tell the difference between typical Cantonese and Chao-Zhou cooking, you must be an expert gourmet taster, because even Guang-Dong locals by be confused by them.

SERVICE

In a typical Hong Kong style restaurant, service should be attentive but not necessarily warm.  This place is pleasantly warm - maybe because it's relatively new and the servers are not millionaires YET.  All tables are full between 6pm to 9pm, so it's quite an achievement to see that the dishes are delivered quickly and in the right order.  They even tried to serve the soup for us, AAAH!  Well, it wasn't anything impressive, but just good baseline service.

AMBIENCE

Another cook-cutter Chinese seafood restaurant - not much to speak of.  It's at least clean and not falling apart yet, and that would be true for just about all restaurants I would review.  There's hardly any decorations either - I guess they figure they attract people with quality of food, which is a good idea.

VALUE

I fully expected to spend $30/person for the kind of feast we had, but it turned out to be like less than $20.  We're talking crab, fish, shrimps, etc., all kind of good stuff.  You usually can't go wrong with a popular Chinese seafood restaurant if you are a seafood lover - but this one definitely stands out in the price-to-performance ratio.  Then again, we're in LA, the premier cheap Asian food capital of the U.S.....

Line up outside and be very patient - they serve course by course so it typically takes the last table at least 1.5 hr to finish everything.  They actually open till kind of late, so it's ok to show up at 8:30pm.