10285 Chapel Hill Rd
Suite # 300
Morrisville, NC 27560
919.468.6878
Between Aviation Parkway and Airport Blvd in the same shopping center as Neomonde Bakery.
Like many of the American style Chinese food, Orient Garden features takeout and dine-in. With their motto, “good food is always our business” I was pleased to check them out. I gotta give credit where credit’s due … they are consistent. Whether that’s a good thing or not I’m not sure.
For appetizers, they have the typical fried starters: fried egg roll, spring roll, wontons, crab rangoon and a selection of dumplings. They also have the ubiquitous egg drop, wonton and hot-n-sour soup. Don’t expect much more. I tried the “seafood velvet soup” which turned out to be a glow-in-the-dark yellow starch concoction with big chunks of imitation crab meat. I suppose for $7 I shouldn’t have expected much.
Their dishes were equally uninspired. They serve in the same basic proteins: chicken, pork, beef and shrimp with different style brown sauces. I found all of them unappetizing. After sampling a few different style dishes I discovered that they were all basically the same. The houses specials were equally mediocre. There is a selection of vegetarian and tofu dishes, but for the most part, served in the similar brown sauce.
No Chinese takeout menu would be complete without a selection of fried noodles and fried rice. Orient Garden serves the Singapore style rice noodles (mei-fun or pancit), wide noodles (ho-fun) and soft noodles (lo-mein). Now typically, I always thought chow-mein was written 炒面 and literally means stir-fried (chow) noodles (mein).
One thing that I learned here in North Carolina is that chow-mein did not refer to fried noodles, but rather napa cabbage and onion. So when you order chow-mein, don’t expect any noodles because you’ll be disappointed! I looked on the internet but have yet to figure out when chow-mein referred to noodles and when it doesn’t. For the record, it seems like every Chinese restaurant I went to in the San Francisco Bay area served chow-mein as fried noodles and none one the ones here in North Carolina serve chow-mein with noodles. Maybe they refer to different words in Chinese, I don’t know.
For the dining in experience, they do have a mosaic wall tile and what they describe as a miniature cork sculpture. I am not much of art connousieur but they looked rather plain to me (and that is as close to a compliment as I can legitimately pay). Their prices are reasonable ($10-$15 for an entree) and quality is consistent. If you are looking for a quick takeout, give Orient Garden a try. But if you’re looking for that little bit extra, better keep looking.
