My husband Daniel and I recently sent our youngest child off to preschool so now we have six hours to ourselves every week. We thought it would be a good idea to set aside one afternoon as a date time. We really enjoy eating out, but we don't enjoy the high price tag so I started trying to find places with good inexpensive food. After poking around on Chowhound.com and Yelp.com I came up with a list of places in the San Gabriel Valley that we want to try out. We thought it would be fun to blog about it so some of our friends and family could try out these restaurants also. We are going to try to visit one new place a week and would ideally like to keep our bill at $10.00 for both of us with a maximum of $15.00. We will let you all know how we do in our search for the best cheap food.
New Bamboo Garden
The first restaurant we decided to try was New Bamboo Garden, a relatively new Chinese restaurant in the city of San Gabriel. We had read about their affordable lunch specials and wanted to try them out.
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| New Bamboo Garden |
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New Bamboo Garden is located in a small strip mall next door to a busy Trader Joe grocery store. The decor is nothing special: a fairly typical hole in the wall with cheap tables and chairs. The restaurant was very clean which I always take as a good sign. The combination lunch plates are served with soup (egg flower or hot & sour), fried or steamed rice, an egg roll, and fried wontons. Their were 22 lunch plates to choose from and they ranged in price from $4.75 to $5.75. We decided to order different items and compare.
I (Marisa) ordered the Three Ingredients Tastes ($5.75) which is a dish of shrimp, chicken and steak cooked in a stir fry sauce and mixed with vegetables. I had the egg flower soup for my starter. I was not impressed by the soup. It was bland and had a thick disturbing consistency (like jelly). There was tofu, cabbage and egg in the soup, but everything was under seasoned.
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| Egg Flower Soup |
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After trying the soup I was worried about the rest of the meal but I shouldn't have been. The egg rolls and fried wontons were both good. The eggroll was crispy but not greasy like they can easily become. They consisted mainly of carrots and cabbage. The wontons were typical, but since I am a sucker for anything fried I enjoyed them. The eggrolls and wontons were served with a dipping sauce of sweet and sour sauce and spicy mustard.
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| Egg rolls, wontons, dipping sauce |
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The service at the new bamboo garden was excellent, the server was at our table with water within minutes of us sitting down. The food came out quickly and steaming hot. Our water glasses were always full. When my main dish came out I was really happy with how much food I was served. I easily had enough for two meals. My dish had a lot of different components, shrimp, steak, chicken, broccoli, snap peas, mushrooms, and water chestnuts. The meat was good and not fatty at all. The vegetables were crisp and fresh and the stir fry sauce had a good flavor to it; a nice balance of sweet and salty.
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| Three Ingredients Tastes (I spelled it how it appears on the menu) |
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I had the boba milk tea to drink and it was good; for 98 cents I enjoyed every sip. The steamed rice that came with my meal was unremarkable. It served as something to soak up sweet and sour sauce.
I (Daniel) ordered the Orange Flavored Chicken ($5.75) and opted for the hot & sour soup and fried rice. Unlike Marisa, with her egg flower soup, I actually enjoyed the hot and sour soup. The heat in it was very mild and it could have used more tang (sour) to it, but over all I enjoyed the flavor. Like Marisa I enjoyed the egg rolls and wontons.
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| Hot & Sour Soup |
As with Marisa's Three Ingredients Tastes, my serving of Orange Flavored Chicken could have served two people. The breading on Orange Chicken can often be used to hide fatty and poor quality chicken. That wasn't the case at New Bamboo Garden. The chicken was good and the sauce on it shockingly tasted like oranges instead of just a sweet sauce. The broccoli was also surprisingly fresh and crisp. The only complaint I had with the Orange Flavored Chicken was that while it was listed as spicy it was only mildly spicy. That is good if you are appealing to the whole family. Not so good if you are a spice lover. I will let you come to your own conclusion on whether that is bad or good.
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| (Not so spicy) Orange Flavored Chicken |
My final lunch item was the fried rice. For me this was the only disappointing aspect of New Bamboo Garden. There was nothing to it. Basically it was bland rice with some fried egg in it. No veggies, no meat, no flavor. Considering how good the vegetables were in the entrees I was disappointed there was no veggies included in the rice. Since the rice is just a compliment to the entree my disappointment was minimal, but save yourself the calories and get the steamed rice.
All in all I thought my meal was extremely good for the price. I was very pleased.
It seemed like the New Bamboo Garden had a thriving take out service; the phone rang constantly. But there was only one other diner in the restaurant. To try and change this they offer a 20% discount if you dine in. If at all possible I would take advantage of this almost unheard of special. Our total bill before our discount was $14.90. After the discount our bill came to $12.60.
Both Daniel and I enjoyed this dining experience and would recommend the New Bamboo Garden to others. I will end this blog post with the quote that was on the fortune cookie I received with my bill, "May the warm winds of heaven blow softly upon your sprint.". I think it meant to say "spirit", but I've been doing a lot of running lately so I will gladly accept the warm winds of heaven blowing upon my sprint.
Now Go Fill Those Bellies...
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