A Taste of China — Restaurant in Louisville

I tried A Taste of China for the first time tonight, getting take-out. I am unlikely to return. I don't mind shabby-but-clean. This place is shabby & skungy gross. When you walk in everything smells of grease. There were food bits on the tables, a film of greasy dirt on everything else, the windows & doors & walls streaked & splattered with assorted ick, & the fan pointing at the kitchen area had strings of dirt hanging from its frame.

Despite the unpleasant surroundings I ordered 3 dishes because I wanted to try a range of things. The steamed rice was good. The beef w/ Chinese vegetables was adequate: the pieces of beef were of good size & reasonably tender. There was nothing Chinese about the vegetables (carrots, snow peas, celery) but at least were not overcooked. However all of it was coated with a very salty, gelatinous, generic brown sauce. The chicken with mixed vegetables (from the "diet" menu) had large pieces of white-meat chicken & lots of veggies. It was cooked with zero seasoning -not even soy sauce- and so was profoundly bland. I also ordered pork chow mein. The dish I got had pork & various sliced veggies, but had no noodles. It was as if they made the dish but forgot the noodles. How do you forget the noodles in a dish whose very name means noodles?

Since I was really craving noodles, this was a large strike against the restaurant, but it could have been a bizarre mistake & I would have given them another chance. The things that changed this from being a 3-star "mediocre but cheap" review to a 2-star "I won't go there again" review were the fried dough & the fortune cookies. The fried dough was off - they need to change their oil because it tastes old. And then there were the fortune cookies. They were not stale - I could of coped with stale. I was expecting stale after the condition of everything else I'd tried. Instead the fortune cookies were profoundly rancid. I'd ordered extra because I love fortune cookies. I opened the wrappers & smelled each of them. Every single one was bad. It's been 30 minutes & I'm still trying to get the taste out of my mouth from the first rancid fortune cookie that I accidentally started to eat before spitting it out in disgust....

Did a walk-in/take-out order for lunch. The wait was a little long, definitely longer than expected for the number of people there ahead of me and the amount of food they had ordered, but it was still short enough that I was able to get back to the office and eat before my lunch break was over.

The eggroll was cooked to perfection. Crispy on the outside, hot on the inside, and not greasy at all. Exactly what you want when you order take-out.

The General Tso's was delicious. The sauce they use/make is different than the majority of places, and has much more of a vinegary flavor to it, so it doesn't overwhelm your mouth with sugary-sweetness. It could have used a little more red pepper, but at that point I'm nitpicking over spiciness which I know isn't going to be the same for everybody.

The fried rice definitely left a lot to be desired. The rice itself was overcooked and the vegetables in the rice had solid black char marks from being in contact with the pan for too long. I wouldn't mind this, if the rice itself had picked up some of that wonderful flavor rice gets when it forms a crust along the bottom of a pan (common in middle eastern and iberian dishes) but that wasn't there. Instead it was a dark brown, chewy mess that tasted vaguely of char.

The business itself is exactly what I was expecting when I walked inside; a complete hole in the wall joint. That might not be your brand of restaurant, but in my experience, the best places care more about the food than the decor. Sure, a nicer looking or cleaner place might have convinced me it was perfect, but at the end of the day I don't care what it looks like if I'm getting take-out.

All in all, I will probably go back from time to time, but it isn't going to become one of my local lunch-time staples. The price was on par with other asian restaurants, but that is still a little too expensive for me to splurge on more than once...

I've ate here a lot. Never really had an issue, except for the usual lady who answers the phones sometimes being a little rude, but it's a hard job in a crappy part of town, so she probably deals with really awful people all day. But today our experience was different. The fried donuts were okay, kind of greasy but not bad, and the pink lemonade was perfect. But the honey bbq wings didn't have much meat on it this time, and it tasted weird. The bourbon chicken combo meal we got was hard and gristley. There was a long, thin, hard piece of meat that almost looked like pork included. Not sure what kind of meat it was. When we called to complain, the woman kept treating us like liars and talked down to us, saying it was impossible for the meal to be bad quality. She kept being rude on the phone and twice accused us of yelling, when the only one yelling was her (as well as interrupting us). The woman that took the phone from her was much nicer but kept giving us the run around. I told her I wanted either a credit or my money back for the $7.50 bourbon combo that was so awful, and she refused, saying her computer would not let her do that unless we brought it in ourselves to return it. I wasn't about to do that in the dark in this rough neighborhood, and they weren't budging, so we reluctantly let it drop and got off the phone, feeling really upset about the whole situation. The honey bbq wings may be good, but I don't know if they're good enough to continue ordering after this whole ordeal. We may not order from them again. What we went through tonight was just bad...