South China — Restaurant in Alexandria

My review is based off of what I expect good American- style Chinese takeout to taste like...This place is good. Not excellent but not bad at all. Establishment: consistent of what a great Chinese takeout should look like. Hole in the wall, slightly shady looking, with a person working the cash register while simultaneously taking orders over the cordless phone. Food: down to earth, not some weird fusion organic hipster takeout. I ordered a vegetable spring roll and shrimp and broccoli. Spring roll was excellent. No duck sauce needed. Tasted exactly the way a takeout spring roll should. The shrimp was nice and firm. Not fresh caught obviously, but tasted good and didn't have any weird fishy aftertaste to it. The broccoli was perfectly cooked tender. The brown sauce was good. Not the best ever, but not bad at all. It's missing a certain umami. Maybe needs a tad bit more msg, garlic, or sugar. The sauce should also be a little thicker. It was still good and I would definitely come back. Tip: skip the reviewers who are expecting this to taste like AUTHENTIC Chinese cuisine (insert question mark meme guy). Also, skip the reviewers whose only other Chinese takeout experience has been...

After being my families favorite spot Chinese spot for nearly 10 years I’m disappointed to say that South China is not what it used to be. No other Chinese food could could beat theirs.

BUT lately the food has been average and the service is very different. They used to serve your order on some large plates to serve onto your own plate. Now they give you your food in to go containers placed in a bag. Then you have to take it out and serve it with your plastic forks/spoons onto your paper plate.

A older lady that’s there stands at your table, rag in hand, making you feel rushed. She’s constantly going to the table asking if you’re done with something and removing it before you can even answer that you are in fact not done. And she coughs into her hand, wipes her nose with the back of her hand then hands you your food and utensils. She started wiping the table while some of us were still sitting down and moved everything. I hate to say this incident is the reason for us no longer returning.

The lady at the register was very friendly and speaks...

The food quality was subpar. We ordered two specials with sesame chicken and white rice along with a order of pork fried rice (because you can’t add pork fried rice to the sesame chicken on the website).

The special came with broccoli that honestly just tasted like broccoli out the produce section that was warmed up. No seasoning and barely cooked.

The sesame chicken had a lot of breading on it - more breading than actual meat to be quite honest. However I do like breading. The problem was that it was dry. Very dry. It kind of looked like the chicken was just placed in the sauce instead of tossed.

The white rice was very dry. I like to mix my sesame chicken with rice but since I had barely any sauce it was quite subpar.

I don’t think we will be ordering here again. The ordering was okay, and the service was...