The Service was Excellent but the Food Wasn't
This is the worst Chinese food I've had in DECADES. The dishes we ordered (SaCha chicken and Garlic pork plus the sampler appetizer) were greasy, overcooked, and bland. The pork was better than the chicken but was, at best, barely mediocre (and that's being generous). The rice was overcooked but moderately tasty. (How do you mess up rice? The rice I buy from Costco - not because it's good but because it's the cheapest big bag they sell - and throw in the rice cooker with no preparation is better. The high quality Costco rice is a lot better.)
When I first walked in, I was concerned. Green China has a China diner look that often signals mediocre food. But I stayed because sometimes a diner is a hidden gem and this place had good reviews. Then I saw curry on the menu. I should have run immediately but I gave the restaurant the benefit of the doubt, thinking maybe one of the cooks had lived in India and learned to make curry there. Then I saw that they had a variety of styles, like Szechuan, Hunan, Mongolian, and SaCha. That should have been enough to make me leave immediately but, having seen the uniformly good reviews, I thought that maybe the food would be good even if it was inauthentic. (What restaurant does so many types of cuisine? Most good restaurants focus on one.) My final mistake was in ordering SaCha. When I eat Chinese food, I usually prefer Hunan, Yunnan, or Szechuan but since I'd never tried SaCha (and since the person working there couldn't really explain the differences in the various cuisines - another red flag, although at the time I attributed it to bad English), I thought I'd try it. The Hunan or Szechuan probably would have been spicier, which I would have preferred. But the garlic pork was only marginally better than the SaCha chicken and was also overcooked, fairly bland, and greasy. (I enjoy delicate food if it's tasty - one of my favorite Chinese dishes is a subtle and mild vegetable dumpling from a tiny hole in the wall restaurant - but the SaCha chicken wasn't tasty.)
I'm giving Green China two stars instead of one only because I didn't throw the food out. I put most of it in the frig. I'll probably eat it later out of guilt over wasting food so I thought one star was too low (since it is edible, if barely). And the service was very good.
I'm from the Bay Area so maybe the large number and type of Asian restaurants (from great to barely decent within each type) there have made me jaded about Chinese restaurants. But my brother, who's lived in the St. Peters/O'Fallon area almost his whole life, thought the food we got at Green China was mediocre as well. He's been bugging me for months to try this restaurant but after trying these dishes he said he didn't want to go back. (BTW, he loves crab rangoons and said that these tasted frozen and store-bought.)
Pros: I got a lot of food with each dish. (Also a con, given the quality of the food and my guilt about throwing food out.) They gave me free rice with both entrees even though I didn't order it. Since the rice was the tastiest food we got, I guess that's a good thing even though I shouldn't be eating carbs. The food was ready quickly and the person I dealt with was polite and efficient.
Cons: The food was bad. Everything was overcooked. The veggies were soft (most to the point of being limp) and bland. The meat was bland. The entrees were very greasy, so much so that, even after spooning off a LOT of oil from the entrees, the seasoning and sauce were difficult to taste. The rice was overcooked but otherwise decent. The appetizers seemed like they were frozen (and probably store bought) and recooked a bit too long. (A few were very dark brown - black on some sides.) I've had better food at Panda Express.
What do you expect from a restaurant that serves curry, Hunan, Szechuan, SaCha, Mongolian, and possibly other cuisines? Most of it is almost inevitably going to be bad. (Would you expect a restaurant that served Memphis BBQ, Santa Fe cuisine, New England style seafood, TexMex, California cuisine, and creole to do it well? Serving so many different Chinese cuisines is the same thing.)
So I mostly blame myself for not heeding the MANY red flags about this restaurant. And also my brother for whining about wanting to go here for months because Green China had such good reviews.
Recommendation: Try a local Thai restaurant. I haven't tried many here but, so far, every one that I've tried has had decent - very good food and at least one of the dishes I've eaten at each Thai restaurant was very good - excellent. I can't say the same for the Chinese restaurants I've eaten at in this area. read more
