Oriental Cafe — Restaurant in El Paso

This is my go to place for home style Chinese comfort food takeout. Been a semi-regular take out customer for about 8 years. This restaurant exists as kind of a grey area as far as Chinese restaurants in El Paso. This quality of Chinese food here is basically that of a somewhat average Szechuan restaurant if it was located in a much larger East or West coast city with a larger Chinese population, but instead it is here in El Paso. For that reason this restaurant exists in between the grey area of the majority highly westernized Chinese fast food joints of El Paso with a very unauthentic limited menu that uses a lot of MSG and the some of the more expensive sit down authentic Chinese restaurants (there really only are a few) which tend to balance the flavors more delicately with minimal or no MSG (but also charge about 40% more per dish). I do believe that Oriental does not use MSG.

The flavors at Oriental Cafe are authentic enough, if not often very bold and the ingredients are of good enough quality (I have been surprised at the ingredients that some other El Paso restaurants have tried to use). The quality is good enough considering how quickly they make it and the prices are dirt cheap. Due to the speed of their stir fry process the flavoring and consistency sometimes varies, but I kind of expect that from a restaurant like this. It varies from wow they really nailed the steamed fish...it melts in your mouth and has amazing fragrance this time to hmmm...I think they overcooked the eggplant it's a tad bit mushy.

A good hole in the wall restaurant if you want to experiment with the flavors of Szechuan Chinese on the cheap. If you are very used to Americanized Chinese, certain items might not be to your taste, but they are dirt cheap so you really not risking too much. They have a pretty big menu, and you would be hard pressed to find a lot of the items elsewhere.

Their mannerisms that some of the other reviewers mention with low marks? I don't think they're rude as others mention. I just think they have the mannerisms of typical 1st generation mainland Chinese, meaning they are generally pretty blunt and to the point. They really do not try to suck up to everyone with fake politeness which has become the standard for "customer care" now a days to sell their product. but that suites me just fine. I personally have no need for someone else to validate me with fake respect or politeness. I just want to pick up my food...

I loathe writing bad reviews, but be warned…I thought I was getting punked when my son got home with our order from here. It did not smell like Chinese food at all. The box was soaked in lard or something similar that didn’t look like it came from our food but some sort of spill. There was a very strange black charred crust thing in oil stuck amongst our food. It seems like they used very old and brown oil to cook everything because everything smelled like overly used burned vegetable oil. Those dinner packs are a joke…whatever the silver wrapped chicken is was missing but I was fine without it at that point. The soup smelled and tasted like what I would imagine toilet water would taste like. The Mongolian beef was not even close to what it’s supposed to be. It was straight up chopped beef on top of what looked like chips or those crisps that go in the soup. I later figured it it was a bunch of super fried hard noodles (huh?). I love Chinese food and it was so sad. We spent over $50 for 3 of us and only one ate about half of her noodles and had diarrhea all night. I did call to kindly tell them the issues and wow…the lady who answered just straight up attacked me verbally. I almost felt at fault for a minute until I calmly asked her to calm down. I did offer to send her pictures of our food and she yelled no! She then loudly and rudely said that everyone always wants to send pictures for their money back and that if I didn’t like the food to take it back and she would try to fix it. I did attempt to confirm that she had just told me that this happens often, but she yelled over me. I was so shocked for the response that I couldn’t help but say thank you and hung up as I silently sat in shock. Lesson learned. It was a surreal experience. I can’t believe that this is a restaurant selling this food and service. I’m floored. Keep our $50, we threw it all out and accepted that sometimes you just have to let it go. Check out the pictures to see why I truly thought I was being punked. It’s so weirdly not normal even for the worst of restaurants. So confused. Not worth it, but...

Stay away from this place. My wife and I ordered the orange chicken and beef and broccoli combos. We have never asked for a refund on any orders for takeout however this time we did. Our food was ordered to go and we asked for extra soy sauce and hot mustard however we only received three packets of soy sauce and one tiny thing of hot mustard. The food was just tossed into a box and leaked all over my wife's vehicle. After trying to eat the food it was seriously unedible. I called them and told them that I would like to bring the food back and get a refund but not for my entire order due to the fact that egg rolls and the crab rangoon wasn't that bad and we were able to eat that so I understood that we shouldn't get an entire refund. The meat that was in the beef and broccoli was nothing but overcooked Gristle and the orange chicken was just chicken fat fried together with no taste. My wife actually took the food back and the lady that runs the front was nothing but rude explaining to my wife that it is rude for her to take the food back because it's an insult. However they did give us a partial refund for the food that...