So, actually I headed off to try to find Mandarin House Chinese Restaurant. Funny thing, I called the number and it was answered, but with a different name that I did not catch right away. I got my order placed, and headed off to the address on the website, and it isn't Mandarin House anymore. So, I called again and I wish I had paid attention to the name they said as they answered. I got directions and headed off to what I assumed was the new location, which was a couple miles up the road. But, when I arrived there, no Mandarin House. I called again, and this time I heard it, Rice Bowl Café, which I had seen where they said they were. Turns out that Mandarin House has been closed for two years. They need to shut down their website.
So, this review is about Rice Bowl Café, not Mandarin House.
Rice Bowl Café
11200 N. Lamar Blvd.
Austin, TX 78753
(512) 835-8888 (number on the banner on the end of the building)
(512) 837-6361 (the number on the Mandarin House website)
After the mix up over the restaurant and the location, I was amused, which would normally put me in a forgiving mood. I picked up my order and headed back to work, as I always do. Sesame Chicken, lunch portion, Fried Rice, Egg Roll and Hot and Sour Soup. And I would have been in a forgiving mood, until I paid the bill, which was over $9.00. That is a lot for a Sesame Chicken Lunch. Unfortunately, it got worse.
So, the first demerit comes for putting the egg roll in with the steamy rice and chicken. I did not wait all that long, but it was awful. The egg roll was completely limp, with no crunch to it. It was the worst egg roll I have ever eaten. Now some might argue that the restaurant cannot be responsible for the egg roll going limp in a to go order, but I disagree. All they need to do is drop the eggroll into a bag, say one just like the bag of friend won ton strips that came with the lunch and were not in the styrofoam container with the rice and chicken.
Now, there was one good thing about the eggroll. It wasn't loaded down with onions. As you can imagine, things loaded down with onions do not rate highly at Hold the Onions. There were onions in the sauce. There were onions in the Fried Rice. There were onions in the Hot and Sour Soup. I have never seen onions in at least two of those items. Now understand, I don't mean a few finely chopped onions, I mean massive slices of onion in massive quantities.
It got worse. The sauce was full of both onions and some sort of relatively small, but whole peppers. This made the sauce hotter than most I have tasted, but not by a lot. The real problem was that the sauce wasn't very sweet. Actually, thinking about this now, while writing this review, it was sweet....for barbeque sauce! Actually, it wasn't even very sweet for barbeque sauce, but you get the idea. It was savory, and not completely bad, once you separated it from the onions and peppers, but it wasn't very good. Also, the sauce was gloppy and unappetizing to look at, with a gelatinous consistency that spoke of too much cornstarch being used to thicken the sauce.
When you combine less than stellar sauce with overcooked chicken you get a fairly unpleasant combination. The chicken was chewy in a bad way, and over cooked or dried out until parts of it were stringy. Things are not looking good.
The Fried Rice was overloaded with onions, though onions in Fried Rice are fairly common. Once you separated the Rice from its onion prison, it wasn't too bad, but in a meal that is really suffering, it did not shine out either.
So, at last we come to the Hot and Sour Soup, which was also loaded with onions. Now, I generally only want the broth anyway, so I did not really suffer too badly from the onions in the soup, and finally, it seems like they got something right...well, almost. The soup was a little bland, though tasty, without the kick of spice that helps clean out the sinuses while eating a bowl of Hot and Sour Soup.
So, in conclusion, we have a limp as a rag eggroll, overcooked chicken in gloppy unappetizing sauce with a side of bland friend rice followed up by a mediocre soup, every last bit of buried in onions, as if that could save it, and the whole thing overpriced.
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