Monterey Palace Restaurant — Restaurant in Monterey Park

Overall rating: 3

The restaurant was mostly full of Chinese speaking customers except for our diverse table of 5 (1 Caucasian; 1 Indonesian; 2 Chinese and 1 Japanese).

Food: 3 stars for Dim Sum The siumai dumpling was mushy, malformed and the bits of shrimp were not good quality. However, the leek/chive shrimp dumpling was good as was the black bean spareribs with pumpkin. The crispy shrimp rice noodle was a hit and I enjoyed it more here than at Lunasia. Pan fried turnip was larger than Lunasia's and had a nice sear. One of the guests at my table really liked that and the baked pork bun with the crunchy topping, but I would have preferred steamed char siu bao. The shrimp har gao; chicken feet were just a-ok.

Service: 3 stars No rolling food carts for dim sum -- you need to decide what you want ahead of time and mark it on a sheet and hand that to the waiter.

Be sure to order tea and water at the beginning of the meal because all of the servers will ignore you the rest of your meal. (it would have been 2 stars, but they took off an undelivered item from our check as requested and also gave us free mango pudding (was a little too firm, though).

The restaurant's staff has a reputation for being rude and I did witness that here and there, but it wasn't as bad as the waiter at the legendary Sam Wo in San Francisco (now closed).

Despite my rating Monterey Palace a 3, I'd be interested in going back to try a la carte entree and side items because that's what most people were doing unlike the group I was a guest of (unfortunately, my group's Chinese host didn't read up on the restaurant's signature dishes...

My group of 4 decided to dine here on a Sunday afternoon around 4:30 pm. There was no wait and so I did not experience the horrendous service that I had last time. As a matter of fact, I believe we were the only party seated for our early dinner!

The server was very good with recommendations and a total of 4 dishes were ordered:

-Cha Siu platter -Salt & Pepper shrimp -Seafood and tofu clay pot -Off-the-Menu noodle dish that is "better than my mom's"

To clarify, the off-the-noodle dish was created because I wanted to order a noddle dish with Shanghai rice cakes. The server told me there were none and so a conversation was had between us about my mom's home cooked Toisan food and a rice noodle dish unique to my culture. Lo and behold, the head chef, who was also Toisan, agreed to make a noodle dish similar to my mom's home cooking because they were out of the rice noodles we initially ordered.

A+ for the jokes (though I think my mom's cooking is still better!) and the earnest efforts to please our party. :) The noodle dish was stir-fried with pieces of marinaded pork belly, Chinese sausage and napa cabbage.

As for the food, the seafood clay pot was cooked very well. There were good, equal portions of the bean curd tofu, fish, shrimp, bok choy & squid. It was a crowd pleaser amongst our table as was the salt & pepper shrimp. The cha siu plate looked a little small to me but the meat was flavorful.

Bottom line: Learning from my past experience with the bad service, the key to good dining at Monterey Palace is to...

I haven't been here in a while. They've remodeled decades ago, and removed the push-cart dim sum --childhood memories crushed. Their service was lackluster for a while there. So I was EXTREMELY hesitant to come here this past weekend. Regardless of what I thought though, these guys have always remained famous enough, that their tiny parking lot has always had issues with people trying to fight for parking spots, and navigating through each other to get in and out, because everyone else just loves to come here. I don't have pictures this time, but I'll admit, service has improved again. You can easily tell which items were bought from a central location, and which ones were done in-house. Admittedly, their 燒賣 (ShiuMai) must be done in-house, but they were kinda' all over the place. They beat out 黃金閣(Golden House) for fugly-looking 燒賣. While Golden House's was more wrinkly, here, they looked like they suffered from multiple sclerosis. Rightly so, we took the 燒賣 out of their miseries, by only getting a single order of 4, then cut them for 5 people to share. The waiter sort of looked at us funny, but cut them as we asked --albeit extremely unevenly, just as uneven as their 燒賣 had been to begin with. Otherwise though, the taste was better than the last time I was here, and it was actually fresh, compared to their dinner items I had a couple years back. So I hope management has finally hired the right people and treat them well enough to keep...