China Kitchen LV

Critic's Review

I recently moved to Las Vegas from Florida, where you simply can't get good Chinese food. I'd previously lived in NY, where good Chinese food is part of take out culture. I was hoping I could get some NY quality Chinese food here.

I chose this place because it's near where I live. It's always good to have a good place nearby. I ordered online, because explaining what you want on the phone to someone who barely speaks English can be frustrating; as is the case with most Chinese restaurants. You can also specify instructions so I could make sure I got the condiments I wanted; I ordered dumplings so my instructions were:

Extra Mustard and Duck Sauce, No Soy

I have real Chinese light and dark soy sauce in my fridge, so I don't want the packets. So when I got to the restaurant, the guy hands me a bag and says "We don't have duck sauce, so we gave you soy sauce instead".

Great. What kind of Chinese restaurant doesn't have duck sauce? Normally I'd have some extra packets in my fridge; but as I said, I just moved here so I don't have any. How the hell can I eat dumplings without duck sauce?

I got home and imagine my horror when I opened the package.

First, this is the kind of fried rice you get when you order the $6.99 lunch special. This is just brown rice with some pork, and it's not even the right kind of pork. Pork fried rice is great because it's made with char siu, which is Chinese Barbecued Pork. You don't make it with sliced pork. Also, fried rice is an egg dish; it should have lots of egg and bean sprouts.

This stuff was garbage. I threw this in the garbage can.

Onto the Egg Foo Young. I get the separate sauce , but I've never seen it cut up like this. Egg Foo Young is a big egg pancake.

Closer inspection told me there was no red pork in here, but they might be edible with a decent sauce.

However the sauce they provided was some sort of red concoction that isn't the correct sauce for egg foo young. I tasted the sauce and I didn't like it. Double drat was that I didn't have any corn starch in the house, so I couldn't make my own sauce. So I wouldn't be eating egg foo young tonight.

The mustard was runny and didn't resemble good Chinese mustard in any way. The good stuff actually comes in the packets; places that cheap out buy a big tub and dish out a spoonful when you ask for it. But they're supposed to mix it to a mustard-like consistency. This was inedible crap.

Normally I'd mix the mustard and the duck sauce to make.a sauce for the dumplings (try it, you'll like it); I don't really care for the soy/scallion sauce they give you with dumplings. I tasted the dumplings and they weren't good; dried out with a bland filling; I opted to also toss them in the garbage.

The next day I hit Walmart and got some corn starch and green onions and tried out the egg foo young. I fried up some of the cut up pieces in peanut oil and made a brown sauce.

Edible, but without the char siu or bean sprouts, this just didn't taste like Chinese food to me.

A very disappointing first try here in Las Vegas.

Conclusion

This is the most incompetent Chinese food I've ever gotten from a restaurant maybe ever; I've had bad food before but not like this. I've never had pork fried rice that didn't use BBQ Pork. It's the entire point of pork fried rice.