Taste of Original — Restaurant in Sacramento

I’m going to start with, “SacTown‼️ We need to support this Restaurant”. If you’re looking for some Hong Kong style comfort food. This is your spot. The dishes are simple and delicious. We ordered, the garlic string beans, scallop egg white fried rice, beef brisket and tendon noodle soup, wonton noodle soup and some take out (which I’ll try to review later).

The food comes out hot (not spicy) because you can hear them cooking with the wok in the back and the wok hei is 🔥🔥🔥. The ingredients were fresh, the spring beans had a crispness to them, and the garlic was so flavorful. The rice had just the right bounciness in its texture. The wonton actually had shrimp in it (c’mon Sac, we need better wonton mein and this is a step in the right direction). The brisket was tender and the tendon was soft and flavorful.

This place is great. It’s not perfect, and it’s not as good as the specialty restaurants in Hong Kong that focus on one dish, but it’s nice to have legit Chinese comfort food. This isn’t chop suey, it’s not cheap, but I think the quality matches the price. So yeah, SacTown, you need to try this place and I think you’ll find that it’s worth supporting.

*no affiliation or monetary...

Outside, this appears to be a typical neighborhood "American-style" Chinese restaurant, and there are plenty of familiar items on the menu (sweet sour pork, honey walnut prawns, kung pao chicken, Mongolian beef, etc.). What makes T of O more interesting than the everyday Chinese restaurant are the less common dishes. We started with pot stickers, salt and pepper tofu, and spicy pig ears, all well prepared. The standout was the pig ears; the ears were thinly julienned with sliced cucumbers, served cold in a very spicy dressing (a crunchy treat with a kick). For our main course, we chose the pork and duck rice clay pot, salted egg yolk pumpkin shrimp, and stir-fried green beans with garlic. I thought the duck in the clay pot was a bit dry, but these dishes were otherwise excellent. Service was attentive if a bit haphazard, but this is a new place so this should improve with time. I thought the food portions were ample for the price, and we had plenty of leftovers to take home for later noshing. Looking forward to future visits. ...

We were served our food 40 minutes after we sat down while people who came in after us were given their food sooner. We got one dish at a time, and by the time all our food got here, the first dish was ice cold. Our waters weren't filled up and nobody came to check on us. We had to ask for extra utensils, napkins etc when someone came by because we felt like ghosts in there that nobody cared about. We're South asian and the restaurant was filled with East Asian customers, we felt racially targeted. It's a shame because the food was good but the people were not. Of course we didn't tip, because the service was non-existant. I'm sure now they'll create this image of South Asians being cheap and perpetuate this idea further for other South Asian customers...