Joy Luck Restaurant

It's a little hole in the wall but the food is good. They are a little heavy on the garlic but I like garlic so I don't mind. It's not great food but you get plenty of it. The meat is a bit tough, the ingredients don't strike me as especially fresh or of the best quality either. I don't know what it is about the food but I like it. The almond chicken is fantastic, the Mongolian beef is tough meat with a ton of onions, so there's both good and not so good. They prefer cash as payment method and will remind you on the phone to bring cash. They do take cards but they do it begrudgingly.

Joy Luck is purported to be a reliable establishment for ordering some of the old fav standby Chinese takeout food (fried rice, pot stickers, meats,/poultry & seafood dishes, etc.) My girlfriend and I finally got around to giving them a try; ordering a few items we'd typically be into for basic Chinese takeout. The shrimp fried rice was fluffy and flavorful. The deep fried prawns were crisp, not too skimpy or overly battered. The Szechuan beef had good flavor but wss skimpy on the beef. Shrimp with black bean sauce was odd because the sauce was thin and transparent. It was disappointingly bland tasting. The shrimp egg foo young was the major loser. The patties (2) were very light and crumbly. The sauce was in a separate container and wasn't the usual 'gravy-like' standard. It was a thin 'sauce' with various vegetables and even mushrooms. We noticed a sweet flavor which added to the thumbs-down rating on that one. Maybe it was just the shrimp foo young that comes that way, but since the patties themselves were so lacking, we'll probably avoid trying the other egg foo young offerings. We will definitely return and look forward to trying some other basic favs like pot stickers, egg rolls and hot & sour soup. I'll update this review accordingly.