China Garden — Restaurant in Estes Park

This place is a disappointment. As usual the Estes Park tourist rip off like most of the restaurants in town. Very mediocre food at over the top prices. Fine for the tourist, I guess, but us residents get shafted like this all the time. Let me give you a run down on the food so you know where I’m coming from. We ordered 3 entrees, all chicken. One was orange chicken, one was sesame chicken both were the sweet and sour style fried chicken. All they did was change the sauce and use the same style of breaded chicken for both. You know the kind you would expect for sweet and sour chicken. Also the sauce they use is obviously the same sauce with either orange added or sesame seeds for the other. So basically chicken nuggets with a syrup sauce poured over it. The variation was not noticeable between the two entrees. The third entree was your basic lo-mein noodles with chicken. This is usually my litmus test for an American Chinese food restraunt. It was ok at best, the chicken was a little undercooked with a weird teriyaki flavor to it. The noodles selected for the dish was questionable. I would use a flat noodle but they went with a thick spaghetti style noodle. Of the three entrees, it was the better of the 3 but still not a good representative of the dish. Lastly the egg drop soup was weird, it had the same consistency of aloe vera gel. Almost like they used the same corn syrup sauce for the orange chicken and sesame seed sauce and most likely sweet sour sauce for this soup too. Man, charging nearly 20 dollars an entree for this kind of cost cutting and pushing it into the customers like we are not going to notice. Don’t expect the portions to be great at this price. You know since is take out only. Yikes! This is our home town Chinese restaurant yay!

This wonderful meal set me back 67 bucks!

If I’m going to overpay for chicken nuggets I’ll go to McDonalds, at least I know what...

Worst customer service ever! The lady didn't appreciate having large groups (ours was a group of 10), and it took forever to get our food and although the rice was meant to "share", there wasn't enough portions for 10 people. She was very hesitant to bring more rice and brought another smaller bowl to show us that she was already being very generous with rice.

The worst part was when I found a hair dangling from within the breading of my chicken (I ordered General Tso's). Immediately stopped eating and informed the waitress. Now the waitress was different from the lady who seemed like the owner. The waitress takes only the chicken with the hair, just one piece and leaves us without asking if we'd like anything to be done about it. We have to call her back to ask if the dish could be replaced. She seems hesitant and says it has to be the same dish or another of same value. So we go with another one of same value. A minute later owner lady comes in and starts asking about what we ordered bla bla and says "I didn't see any hair" "what hair" etc. We're furious at this point because the waitress took the piece with the hair only while leaving the rest of the dish on the table. So we tell her that she'd already taken it. The lady goes back in, screams in the back in Chinese, comes back out and says "I don't know where the hair come from, its not my hair, the chef's hair , I don't know". She tried to blame it on us when every one of us had very dark hair and the chicken hair was white/blonde.

Long story short, lady refused to replace the meal because the "kitchen staff doesn't want to make it" but after much arguing, she agreed to not charge for my meal.

Would...

Our experience here was so devastating, we were looking forward to the food so much but our waitress put such a sour taste in our mouths, we would just like to warn those who are debating on coming here. First off it’s a small restaurant, not a big deal just something to think about with bigger parties. We had a party of 9 and the moment we walked in the door our waitress was giving us stink eye after stink eye. She was impatient and didn’t speak english very well. My family is from asian heritage and were still treated badly. The prices were very expensive compared to the best chinese we have back home, and we questioned that, she explained that it was a family style restaurant which we were okay with, we ordered maybe 5 dishes or so and waited and waited and waited. At one point ALL of our water cups were empty waiting to be filled. We didn’t even see our waitress for 20-25 minutes after placing our order. There was a table to two gentleman next to us also receiving the poor service. Once the food finally came out she still didn’t bother to ask if we’d like more water or refill them, we had to ask her 10 minutes after our food was served to get more. The food was surprisingly good, but the portions were smaller than a individual plate that we have 45 minutes away, and we were unsure how it was supposed to be “family style.” We finished all of our food and waited for another 20 minutes after eating to just receive the check. She was one of the worst people/servers I have ever had, with no sympathy or recognition that she was in the wrong here. If you crave chinese up here look for any other place or order togo, we left still hungry and upset from the...