Address: 10675 San Pablo Ave El Cerrito, CA 94530
Hours: none listed
Parking: street + a lot behind the restaurant
Visited: Friday, February 25, 2011, 6pm
No better time to get our wok on then the next stop on San Pablo, Happy Golden Bowl. HGB’s hard-to-miss exterior is bright – the owners didn’t just raise the red lantern once – they did it like 8 times. Plus, as the take-out menu boldly proclaims, it has “unique taste, outstanding quality!!!” Who could resist?
The bright, fresh interior is vast, with tables in the middle and booths lining the walls. Sure, we were enjoying a nice early-bird dinner at 6; still, it was surprising to see no one there. The wallpaper, printed with teapots and Chinese characters, led Emily to say that “this is awesome wallpaper. I don’t know what it says, but I like it.”
Apparently the chef is a transplant from Chengdu, the spicy home of Sichuan cooking. We love things spicy, and were excited about the prospect of this place being our new go-to Chinese establishment. We were immediately joined at our glass-topped table by a spicy bowl of kimchi and hot genmaicha tea. We were off to a solid start, although the strange gourd bundles and LCD TV playing “Time Life Presents Music of the 60’s” wasn’t really bringing home the right effect.
As with many Asian-food establishments, G-Bowl’s menu did not disappoint with options. The menu goes on for pages, and if you needed any help deciding, framed art on the walls depicted some of the dishes. While most Chinese menus go with standard numbers, Happys’ is so vast that they’ve adopted a letter + number system to handle their staggering 254 options. How can any one place manage to make this many different things? The menu went to S36!!! Our waitress clearly saw how perplexed we were, and stepped in with recommendations, specifically 3 dishes from the “cook particularly recommended section”. We took her up on one, “E3: Szechwan Style Spicy Cumin Sauce Beef/Lamp”. To this we added “ H1: Classic Dry Cooked Green Bean” from “delightful vegetables”, “N2: Beef Chow Fun” and “C7: Creamy Sweet Corn Soup with Chicken”. We were going to add “D5: Classic KingPao Chicken”, but our waitress was nice enough to cut us off – she knew what we didn’t – we’d already ordered enough food for a high school football team, including special teams. Of course, this didn’t stop us from pulling her aside later to add an order of “P4: Green Onion Pancake” from the Dim Sum portion of the tome to fill in the gaps.
At first we thought the prices might be slightly high. This notion was dispelled when the dishes started arriving. This was family size portioning; the food was a bargain. The caldron of creamy corn soup was deliciously gelatinous, the green beans were an equal to some of the best of the genre we’ve tried. The recommended Szechwan lamb dish was delicious. The chow fun was a bit flat, but not bad. Sadly, the low point of the food was a disappointing pile of onion pancakes that lacked salt, although I’m sure we were getting plenty of salt elsewhere to make up for it.
As we attempted to put a dent in our bounty, we saw the take-out business pick up to a steady flow. The only real noticeable drawback was the tremendous number of big flies buzzing about. One landed on the menu as we pondered our choices, drawing our attention throughout the meal to a significant problem as they clustered near lights. We can’t say if this is an every-day problem, but this is what we observed on our visit, and it put a significant damper on the (early) evening. Is this why everyone does takeout, or is it the 10% discount they apply to all orders to go? We’re not sure. Thanks for dinner, HGB, we might be back, but next time we Bowl it, we’ll probably do take out and collect that 10% off.
Final cost: $43.65
