澳門茶餐廳 Macao Cafe — Restaurant in San Gabriel

We have been going to this shopping mall on the corner of Las Tina’s and San Gabriel, for dining with other restaurants for a awhile. We noticed there is a new restaurant opened and decided to give it a try.

The foods were very tasty but with hits and misses. We love the Taiwan style fried vermicelli and vegetables and egg plants. These two dishes are full of flavors and wok Hei. I believe they are in par with the ones we had in Taiwan.

On the other hand, the house especial tea smoked duck is a disappointment. I didn’t taste any tea smoke flavor in the duck. Instead tender and full of tea smoke flavor, the duck was dried and oily as it was fried instead of smoked and steamed as in the traditional way of preparing the duck by most of the Chinese restaurants.

This duck dish is called Zhangcha duck, tea-smoked duck, or simply smoked duck (literally: 樟茶鸭 zhāngchá yā, camphor-tea duck) is perhaps THE quintessential dish of Sichuan cuisine.

It is prepared by hot smoking a marinated duck over tea leaves and twigs of the camphor plant. Due to its complicated preparation, zhangcha duck is eaten more often in banquets or festive events than as a daily household item. I guess with the limited time to prepare this dish for lunch, the restaurant simply just fried the duck and garnished it with some shredded scallion and brought it out as Tea Smoked duck from Taiwan.

Anyway, for those of you just want to try some good Chinese food from different regions, this is one of the places to dine. The prices here for lunch are reasonable. The food...

The gentleman that waited on us was very attentive. Food was pretty good, and heck, I got 1 free refill on the coffee+milk tea! The coffee was much darker, which was great, but I didn't taste a lot of the assam red tea. Still can't complain! Most places don't get the right assam tea leaves with the right fragrance and flavor, but this place at least has that nice dark roast. Their roti was really nice! Flaky crust, chewy but soft center on the inside! With the curry and beef on it? That was really good! Their baked chicken rice I thought was good, and I'm honestly normally not a baked rice fan, but this place did it right! Their vermicelli noodles weren't anything special, but they weren't bad. Fried just right, not too oily, and with just enough flavor. I'd come back...

One of my favorite local restaurant that I visit on weekend for lunch. The selling point of this place is price is fair and food is good. Usually not full house unlike some other super busy HK style restaurants. Parking is tricky depend on what time you arrived, if there is no available parking space that plaza does have a ground level parking structure on side of Gladys Ave. My favorite dish is the grilled chicken (steak) with Icy honey lemon tea. You can have option of steam white rice or spaghetti noodle as side and choice of black pepper or mushroom sauce. The con is sometime I experience kids shouting in restaurant or the waitress delay or made mistake with orders as she wrote order...