Chang Jiang (East Side Madison) — Restaurant in Madison

This is a very long review. The short version is ... the next time you want Chinese take-out, get it from Chang Jiang East Side. Period.

First of all, DO NOT confuse Chang Jiang East Side (4929 Commercial Ave) with the Chang Jiang restaurants on Raymond Rd, Muir Field Rd, and Gammon Rd in Madison. They are not the same, and they are not the subject of this review. My wife and I love Chinese take-out, consider it our decadent treat, and have ordered it regularly wherever we have lived, from as many different restaurants as we can. Chang Jiang East Side is one of the top three, if not the best, Chinese restaurants we have found in our 60+ years of life, head and shoulders above any other in the Madison area. For starters, it is clearly family owned and operated, by people who care deeply about the quality of their food and their service. They treat each customer as if he or she is the most important person in the world at that moment. If they tell you your order will be ready in 15 minutes, they mean 10-15 minutes, not 20-25 minutes. (For this reason, we no longer call ahead to place our order, but drive to the restaurant, place our order in person, and wait. Why take a chance that you'll be delayed and the great food will have begun to cool down?) The food we have ordered in the 5-6 times since we discovered Chang Jiang East Side has been, without exception, wonderful. My absolute favorite, which I've never seen anywhere else, is Coconut Shrimp. We never pass up the Crab Rangoon or Steamed Pork Dumplings. I recently ordered the Crab Stick appetizer for the first time, and it is now on the permanent list. We can also recommend the Boneless Spare Ribs, Hot and Spicy Beef, Beef with Broccoli, and Beef with Garlic Sauce. The only reason I don't mention any chicken or pork dishes is that our tastes favor beef and seafood, so we have never ordered those. I have no reason to believe they're not also wonderful. Since my Asian wife makes the very best fried rice in the history of the world, we have never ordered it from Chang Jiang East Side, but based on everything else we've had, I recommend you...

Appetizers were as expected, soup was good, both entrees were below expectations. Mu shu was alright, sort of vegetable hash, low on the protein of choice, but flavor was good. Gen tsos chicken was Inexcusable. 1/2inch cube scrap of chicken with enormous amount of breading. The entire quart of food was like this. The breading was like 90% of the food provided. Not a chicken dish, more like eating a plate of fried dough with sauce on it. Didn't eat even 1/4 of the 14$ entree, got sick of fried dough chunks pretty quick, as I had ordered --and paid for-- chicken. Also, the scant chicken present was EXTREMELY dry like it had been cooked more than once. I last ordered from this place over one year ago. Gen Tsos was the same dismal quality then. Will not be doing...

When Chang Jiang mess up an order and the customer calls with a complaint and you brush them off and tell us how we should have ordered/said something.. Right, it was our fault. It couldn't have been the Spanish speaking woman who took down our order wrong. No, definitely the customers fault. We drive there to return ALL of the food and was told that they hire people to answer their phones and take their orders elsewhere. So whoever we talked to on the phone just made you lose business. He was rude and very disrespectful. As a person who works in customer service I would never speak to the customer in such a way. Only good thing is we were refunded some...