Jolly Good Chinese and Thai Food — Restaurant in Calgary

Ordered

Ginger beef Chicken & mixed vegetables Sweet & sour pork Chicken fried rice Cantonese Beef chow mein Salt & pepper squid Won ton soup Spring rolls

Ginger beef

Very VERY sweet . The batter was thick and crispy. Maybe crispy isn’t the right word ...what word does one use to describe batter that is so hard it feels like your teeth will break? at certain bits the batter was thin and soft enough to chew but that’s when the real problems hit . Once you interact with the beef - that’s when the real challenges start . Like trying to eat candied spicy leather - sauce was flavourful though!

Chicken & mixed vegetables

Chicken melted unnaturally in your mouth and left a Sandy residue on your tongue . The sauce was too thick and not thoroughly cooked so you could taste the corn starch . Veggies were inconsistently cooked . Some almost raw and some so soggy they fell apart as you forked them on to a plate .

Chicken was clearly doused in some kind of preserving or powdered mix that changed its texture taste and physical structure. It was just plain weird

Sweet & sour pork

was actually super tasty. I suspect they batter the Chinese bbq pork you see at the supermarket and toss it in the sauce

The down side is

They literally toss the pork in the batter and likely dump the whole thing in the fryer .

It comes out one glorious battered mess with random chunks here and there

You grab one piece and mistakenly grab half of the dish

😂

Chicken fried rice

Chicken is diced into cubes that are approx 1x1cm , So incredibly dry and stringy and reminiscent of small shards of dental floss , rice is just a typical fried rice with a pea or 2, tiny microscopic amount of onions and carrots

Wonton soup

So so salty The wontons are SUPER doughy and the pork meat has a strange grittiness to to it . Similar to the beef in weirdness .

Spring rolls

I don’t know how someone can screw up spring rolls so badly - so much effort creating spring rolls that one would assume there would be some effort making the filling somewhat edible .

Despite our desperate attempts to mask the weirdness of these rolls with the provided orange sauce thing ... we ended up tossing them.

Cantonese beef chow mein

This was an incredibly disturbing dish The beef didn’t taste like beef . It was coated in some form of tenderizer or starchy concoction that made the beef taste like dog food . It was SOOOO not okay . The noodles were on the other hand SOOO GOOD , I felt so conflicted eating this . I couldn’t tell if I wanted to vomit and die In a pit of despair or if I wanted to devour the whole dish . Once I realized that the problem was the beef, the terribly seasoned overly corn starched sauce and the sour baby corn that hadn’t been rinsed properly, I quickly discovered the noodles in this dish were surprisingly tasty and addictive . I can’t tell if that’s because my expectations for the meal had dropped so drastically or because the noodles were in fact that good

Salt & pepper squid

So let me just say , IF you are looking for the softly breaded succulent crispy squid you find in the other paradigm in Chinatown , you need to keep looking and just politely walk away. If you are craving the sensations of fried chilli , onion and peppers , sadly , you also need to turn the other way. This dish ...

😂🤣

It’s kind of like a version of battered squid . Like the same batter you would eat at a hole in the wall fish n chips joint . The batter is so heavy and so thick , it takes a couple bites to reach the squid . By the time the batter on these bad oscars are fully cooked , it unfortunately turns the squid into rubber . So so chewy ... like chewing on plastic ? Is there such a thing as plastic rubber ?

Maybe something to consider ordering is salt and pepper fish? You might get some amazing fish!!

I am giving them 2 stars One for the pork and one for the noodles in the beef chow mein .

At the end of the day , the kids and adults were fed- we ate around the weird mystery meat to avoid ordering another meal

I would only ever order again in...

We were hankering for some late night Chinese food, and we're happy to find that Jolly Good was open super late! The shop front is super humble, though that's not a problem with a place that only does take out.

The service was quick and friendly; we ordered the dinner for two, which only took 15 minutes to make.

The food was still nice and hot by the time we got home. Each item was packed well with cardboard separating each item and plastic bags covering the items that could potentially spill.

The items we ordered were wonton soup, chicken fried rice, beef ho fan, and salt and pepper squid. The quantity of each item was massive. Each takeout container was filled to the very top of their containers; in this regard, alone, the value is there.

The wonton soup was had a light and tasty broth. The 6 pork wontons were all a decent size with a good taste. This was the dish that my fiance liked the most.

The chicken fried rice was a bit of a let down. With tiny pieces of chicken, egg, and a pea every so often scattered in a huge box of rice, there wasn't much taste in this item. The chicken was also a bit on the drier side. We probably liked this dish the least.

The ho fan was quite good with big chunks of velveted beef. The noodles weren't brittle, and the dish wasn't too oily. My only gripe about this dish was the size of the chopped onions being much too big. That aside, though, this dish was delicious.

The salt and pepper squid surprised us. At a glance, we've never seen salt and pepper squid like this, so we were unsure what to think. After trying it, though, we liked it quite a bit. The batter is crispy without being too hard, the squid had bite without being rubbery, and the taste was flavourful without being overpowered with spice or saltiness. If I could ask for improvements, I'd recommend less batter, but that wasn't a huge issue. We enjoyed this dish equally to the ho fan.

While we won't be making this our go to place for Chinese food, the portion sizes and late night hours will probably have us coming back when the...

We recently moved to the neighbourhood and with our goto Chinese takeout place being a bit further away, we were on the hunt for a new goto. We drove by this place quite often and wondered if it was worth checking out. I read the reviews first, as I often do, and despite the many negative reviews, we decided to give this place a shot, since a lot of the negative reviews were from a non-Chinese person, and I wanted to see for myself how it was, knowing that often, authentic Chinese food may not be to the taste of the western crowd.

I ordered some pretty standard dishes (ginger beef, sweet and sour chicken, shanghai noodles and beef ho fan) given we have 2 young kids.

The first impression was that the portions are huge. Each styrofoam container was stuffed to the brim. The ginger beef and sweet and sour pork had a lot of sauce pooled at the bottom, and the meat looked to be overfried.

Upon the first few bites, that's when it went downhill. The ginger beef and sweet and sour pork, despite being drowned in sauce, was somewhat tasteless. The beef ho fan was pale in color, and again, tasteless. It had a weird fishiness taste to it as well. The carrots (I've never had carrots in beef ho fan before) were cut very odd - instead of matchstick, it was more of pencil thickness. the bean sprouts were soggy, which shows me it was not fresh when cooked. The shanghai noodle also had a strange fishiness smell to it. either old oil or addition of fish sauce (perhaps it being a Chinese-Thai restaurant, maybe this explains it), but overall it was not authentic Cantonese food.

We had a ton of leftovers because I think everyone was pretty unimpressed with the bland and unappetizing food.

I don't think I'll be ordering from here again, and our search of a new go-to Chinese Take-out joint...