China Renaissance — Restaurant in North Olmsted

the restroom now had a large, red, OUT OF ORDER! (their exclamation point, not mine) sign on the door.

I started looking over their very limited menu when a girl came from behind a new screen which gives a semblance of a hint of an idea that the front, ordering counter/tables area is separate from the back, storage/kitchen area.  I said to the girl, in a questioning tone, "new management?"  to which she replied that she has been there for about a year.  I know I have stopped in less than a year ago and the old owners were still there.

It occurred to me that this was a completely different restaurant, as far as I was concerned.  With any new-to-me Chinese restaurant I visit, I have found that the only accurate way to assess the inherent nature of the entire establishment is to sample their egg rolls and won ton soup.  How they pay attention to the little items will indicate, to me, how the rest of their selections will be prepared.  So, before I waste my money on the more expensive items on the menu, I check the level of care the restaurateur takes with the more mundane, everyday items.  In this case, it was a wise choice; the operative word in my previous sentence is "waste."

I ordered six egg rolls and two, large won ton soups.  [There is no size distinction for their soups on the menu, nor separate pricing therefore.  I simply asked for large and was charged double the menu price.]

I paid for my order, [waited a bit longer than I should have had to, for so simple an order and considering the number of cooks in the kitchen!] accepted my bags and her thanks, and drove home.

The $1.75 "Made with Chicken & Shrimp"  Egg Rolls:

At first look, the egg rolls struck me as being on the rather small side, but maybe not.

The shrimp are salad [smaller than a dime] size, which is entirely acceptable.  I found  three in one of my rolls.  I didn't dissect the others.

The chicken is, for lack of a better description, pulverised.  I can't really describe it any better: it's not ground; it's not minced; it's not chopped; it's almost powdered.  The white stuff sprinkled amid the shredded cabbage and carrots and shrimp in my accompanying isolated picture of the egg rolls is what I take to be the chicken.  If it's not, I probably don't want to know what it really is.

The rolls' overall texture was dry. For a brief moment, I considered that what I took to be pulverised chicken might, in fact, be sawdust!  I'm sure it wasn't, but they were just that dry.

As to their flavour, I found the egg rolls to be quite bland.  None of the incorporated parts lent anything whatsoever to the taste of the whole.  Not even the cabbage!  I was glad of the duck sauce and mustard packets which were included in the bag; they were the only saving grace for the egg rolls.

The 2 x $1.75 Won Ton Soup:

As opposed to straight chicken broth, there seems to be some added flavouring in this soup.  It's almost a fishy taste, but whatever it is, it is not what one would customarily find in won ton soup.

Considering this was supposed to be a large size order, you can see the skimpy portion of won tons which were included.  As it turns out, this was probably a good thing!

The noodles in wonton soup are usually folded to enclose a small lump of some type of ground meat.  There was only one such lump enfolded into one of the noodles; the other two were plain, open squares of cooked won ton noodle dough.  And overcooked, at that. [Think lasagna that is boiled for 20 minutes.  Bleh!]

Two things one can reasonably expect to find in won ton soup are some chopped green onion/scallion tops and a few pieces of julienned pork.  The onions were present but the pork was not.

My overall assessment:

Considering the overstaffed kitchen, I expected more attention to be paid to the quality of food.  If they don't care about the small items, then they're not going to care about the big ones, either.

From my initial order, I WILL NOT be going back to China...

Horrible customer service. This was a place I liked until tonight. From a food perspective, not bad. Pretty tasty and I would recommend. My issue and the reason for the 1 star has everything to do with customer service related issues. I ordered food tonight for my children and myself. They offer delivery and pickup. Delivery was running at about an hour, so I chose to pick the food up to get it quicker. I had to tell the guy on the phone taking my order twice that I wanted fried rice with my meal. When I went to pick up my order, I was asked what kind of rice I wanted because it was never written down. The rice wasn't even in the bag with the food. This should have been a sign. I drive home and realize they forgot my food. My young children already started eating and I call the restaurant. The first thing they say when they pick up the phone is "pickup or delivery". I explain the situation and request that they delivery my missing food. I went round and round with the manager and learned a few things. 1) Delivery costs them $0.53 per mile and delivering my missing food would be too expensive for them. 2) They refuse to deliver missing food on a pickup order. 3) Even though they offer delivery as a standard business practice, they will not deliver to fix an error they committed. I was informed that they were too busy to deal with my issue and even though they had deliveries going out to other people, they would under no circumstance bring me my missing food while their driver was out making other deliveries in the area. They were kind enough to refund my money for only my missing portion of the order if I drove back up and picked up my missing food. They gave me an even $10 and told me to keep the change along with my missing food. Purely based on principle, I cannot and will not recommend this place of business to anyone. This isn't how you treat customers when you commit an error. If they didn't offer delivery as a standard option, I would have had no issue going back up to get the food they forgot to give me. The fact they do offer delivery and refused to have the driver drop off my food while out delivering other orders is unacceptable. I will never order from this...

I called to order for my first time from here today. I asked since they made "Orange Chicken" could they make it into a combination and she said NO, I said ok then I'll just take the Sweet and Sour Chicken, she then said would you like to try the Emperor's Chicken, I asked what it wasshe explained and I said sure. Then she asked me which rice I wanted, I asked for fried rice and asked if she could add pork, she said NO AGAIN. Told me twenty minutes for pick up get there, go to get my food and she looked at my order, said you wait and went to the back AGAIN with my food that was sitting there for pick up. Comes out gives me my food I get home and I have very dry white rice and over cooked hard Emperor's Chicken. Egg Roll was very gritty and undercooked. Not impressed and I'm not too sure how they got a 4.3 star rating serving food like this. Such a disappointment. I did give them one star because the chicken was hot. So apparently you have to eat there food the way they want...