Ching Hua

It looks like Ching Hua is closed… all boarded up and a new restaurant is going in called East End. Too bad, Ching Hua had good food and delivery for free which you would think more Chinese places would have on our little island… good bye Ching Hua

Located in the Alameda Marketplace off Park St., this resturant offers a mix of Peking and Sichaun entrees with dim sum appetizers. Unlike many other traditional Chinese restaurants, it also has a full bar serving wine, a whole range of cocktails, and beer. Happy hours on Saturdays has orange Margaritas for $ 1, and they’re not too watered down and pretty decent sized.
The good things about the restaurant:
* The décor and service were both top-​notch. A good place to go with a large group and enjoy after-​work drinks. Very clean too.
* The appetizer-​sized dry fried spicy chicken wings can easily serve 3 – 4 people, and is good balance of sweet and spicy. Chicken cooked well and the sauce was tangy.
* Spicy garlic eggplant was pretty good — well cooked and flavored — just lacking the spiciness we’ve seen from other places.
* Cherry pork was a version of sweet and sour pork, but with a reddish, cherry ginger sauce. Pork cooked well with crunchy outside and soft inside. Needed some more sauce I think since it was really hard to taste the cherry.
* Spinach and scallap dumpling appetizers were good size — and yes, they do have small pieces of real scallop inside. It tasted better with a dash of the red chilli oil.
The not-​so-​good things:
* I could of sworn that the bathrooms were pay. You basically need to put in a quarter and turn the lock. Or like me you can wait for someone to come out.
* The sesame chicken was fried to the point to being unregonizable mess. Others at my table thought it was sesame beef!
Would probably give more starts if not for the sesame chicken.

So we are new to the island and wanted to have a nice night out with family. The night started out well. We were greeted and seated promptly. This is where it turned quickly.
The service — Sloooow I swear there was one waiter for the entire restaurant. Plenty of people walking around but at least 15 minute wait to take the order.
Appetizers — great price but Meh. The potstickers were chewy and half backed inside
Meal — bland. If you are old (over 70) you might like it but the spicy was not spicy the rest of the food was so-​so
Probably wont go back as there are plenty of other places to try within 1 block of this place.

I’ve only been to this location once, but I have been to Shen Hua in the past and expected the same type of atmosphere, service and food. As you can tell by the rating, it didn’t live up to the hype. I’ll give the atmosphere a pass since the night we went for dinner, there was heavy rain. We had dinner with extended family and were planning to eat several dishes. We ended up eating several dishes, but of the 6 dishes we ordered, 3 of them were not available and we were not informed of this until after the orders were taken.
As for the service, it was okay. I expected that the staff would be all around us all the time since there were only one or two other tables with people. The food quality was fine, I just wish we had the dishes that we originally ordered. The Tan Tan noodles were good. They had a thick sauce that was pretty good. The hunan lamb was nothing to write home about. I remember that the pork ribs had good flavour, but could have used more meat on them.
The parking situation is fine with plenty of street and I think the Marketplace lot is also okay.

CLOSED DOWN!
I work at the Alameda Marketplace so I’ve had the pleasure of trying the food here often. I usually get the same dish, Hong Kong Style Pan fried noodles with vegetables. I should preface this by saying I am a bit of a picky eater when it comes to this dish. I like it a specific way leaving out certain ingredients and adding certain things. They are very accommodating to me and friendly and I use this as a good gauge for customer service at various restaurants in Alameda. Some places scoff and give me attitude when I try to order something special, but here they are super friendly and nice about it and that’s a plus for sure with customer service! The restaurant itself is cozy and never a long wait. It’s a perfect view on the corner of Park St. and Buena Vista. I would recommend it is a nice place to take a date or your family as the atmosphere in the restaurant is modern, bright, clean and comfortable. The wine is also great as I had one of the best red wine experiences here over dinner with a friend. They say on the menu that their food is best to try eating it there versus taking it home to go, yet I take that noodle dish I love home and it’s still fine as a to go dish. Overall I would highly recommend this place and would eat there again often!

I love this place, prices are decent to moderate, love the atmosphere the food itself its tasty and the staff is very friendly.
simply love it.

I loved this place! We went on a Sunday night and it wasn’t too crazy busy. I loved the $ 2 Margies and the food wasn’t too pricey either. The portions were just right and not too greasy. The only small little gripe is that it was a little salty for my taste.
We had mongolian beef and chow mein. yumz yumz yumz I recommend both.

For my husband and I, Ching Hua is a must at least once a month.
The servers always greet us warmly and they know the food we like to order, whether we eat in or take out. The food is always fresh, no MSG, and the portions are generous. Five Stars for Ching Hua!

ching Hua offers an happy hour (5 – 6:30, not 5 – 7 as listed online) the appetitizers being served are $ 5, not $ 4 as listed. happy hour review only.
seating is lowkey
eats:
–house won ton (⁶⁄₄)
fried giant golf balls, not a soup as i thought
came with mustard and sweet & sour sauce dip
pork filling barely discernible
–salt & pepper squid (½ order, 5)
looked like leftover scrapes destined for the garbage bin, very small pieces
not deep fried enough, stale oil taste.
–crab shao loong bun (4/​$ 50
4 steamed items looking like xiao long bao/​siu mai
tasted stale, mostly old stringy crab
1.5 stars, not acceptable
drinks: lemon drop (5)
–salt on rim, tasted ok, lst time for me.
foodnotes:
–pan pan won ton came by mistake (crab/​cheese)
–no hint on menu won ton fried or in broth for that matter.
–service almost ok.
–food really bad.

No MSG + Housemade Noodles + $ 1 Orange Margaritas: on Saturday’s (regularly $ 2)…Woo hoo!!! + Generous portions + Beautiful restaurant = Five Stars
This is one of my local favorite «Cheap Eats» $ 20 easily covers dinner for two with drinks!

Went as a family (2 little ones) on a Sunday nite. Overall great experience. Food was great, service professional, décor hotel-​like. Ordered seafood curry noodles (handmade) and lemon chicken w side of rice, tea and a coke. When we were deciding whether to order one more dish, the waiter was so kind to voluntarily tell us that that was plenty of food for us– he wasn’t just trying to get more business. The prices are noticeably higher that your average Chinese restaurant, but you get a lot of high quality food. For example, our lemon chicken dish was minimally battered pieces of chicken breast, with a lemony sauce (without food coloring or MSG!)
The only thing I would knock off ½ star for which isn’t their fault is «the restroom experience». Need a token, go down maze hallway, arrive at «shared building restroom» and the women’s restroom was blocked, token couldn’t go in. So by default, me the mom, with a 5 yr old who really needed to go, dared a trip into the men’s restroom! Better than expected, but wouldn’t like to experience that again.
Food: 5
Coziness: 3
Price for value: 4
Service: 5
Cleanliness: 5
Classiness: 5
Overall: 4.5

Went for lunch. We don’t drink, so strictly interested in the food. Rating: 4.75 stars, most dishes were 5-​star, but soup was so-​so. We are Asian Boomers tired of the increasingly mediocre slop being served by too many Chinese restaurateurs. We would rather pay for quality, not quantity.
Service was excellent. Waiter took me seriously when I told him to make it EXTRA hot/​SUPER-​spicy. We are not timid about chiles, and the kitchen came through with flying colors.
Pros:
— Very nice décor, easy parking. Not connected directly to the Marketplace, but they both share the same Plain-​Jane restrooms down a twisty corridor.
— Spicy curry seafood noodles: 5-​star, and even better reheated for dinner! It’s a large pasta bowl full of udon-​style noodles with scallops and shrimps. The sauce was a rich reddish-​brown from the generous use of Asian chili sauce as well as a massive fistful of dried whole red Jalapenos.
The chiles showed blistered sides from being properly stir-​fried in the oil before anything else went in, a step often ignored by careless cooks. A little too many green onion shreds, but the baby corn, which we normally don’t like, were fabulous in the spicy curry sauce, which was amazingly flavorful.
— Chicken-​shrimp crispy wontons: 5 stars. Comes with a dry mustard sauce and a sweet-​sour sauce. Ching Hua bases their housemade sweet-​sour sauce on cherries, and it’s a nice change. I don’t normally like mustard sauce but a little dab of it livened up the sweet-​sour. The wontons were stuffed full of diced chicken breast and tiny bay shrimp, nicely fried and greaseless.
— Dry-​fried chicken: 5 stars. Orange Chicken by another name, it’s lightly battered, deep-​fried, and comes with a spicy orange sauce. Spouse admitted I was justified in asking the kitchen to make it extra hot, as the two spicy dishes came out the way we like. This had juicy chicken breast, a light batter (nice change from the armor plated batter-​frying that bad restaurants produce), and a savory spicy sauce perfect with rice.
— Garlic noodles: 5+ stars. If you are a pasta aficionado and can taste the subtle differences when the noodles are fresh, the garlic isn’t burnt, and absolutely fresh oil is used with no MSG added, these are amazing. It’s a massive bowlful, bright green from spinach. They were cooked then quickly stir-​fried with thin slices of fresh shiitake mushroom and an enormous quantity of chopped garlic. Nothing else — perfect as is, a triumph of perfumed subtlety. Amazing by itself, perfect with food. If you are the type who puts soy sauce on your rice because you think it has no flavor otherwise, don’t order this. You won’t appreciate it.
— Dry sauteed green beans: 5 stars. First time we have gotten the mediocre Kentucky Wonder-​type beans properly handled! Even without the ground pork, they were properly cooked — still green, but soft enough to take the ‘grassiness’ away and develop proper sweetness. What does appear are the chopped pickled vegetables, which along with finely diced green onion and a slight touch of garlic and chile flakes, making this a fine rendition of one of my favorites
Cons:
— No ground pork in any dish.
— House soup, neither of us cared for it. A variant of hot-​and-​sour soup, it was an unthickened consommé, heavy on the vinegar and light on the heat. It wasn’t a promising start. If you’re going for a wimpy version of this soup even though you can’t take chile heat, this is better at Renee’s Place/​Albany, where she has the right thickened texture, lots of scrambled egg and a generous amount of lily buds and cloud-​ear mushrooms (altho again, no sourness, no heat in hers either).
Summary: Chinese food trying to get to the bistro level, and very often succeeding. The kitchen knows what they’re doing, and will reward knowledgable diners who are tired of the garbage being served at too many of Unilocal’s 4– and 5-​star Chinese places, that don’t deserve such a rating (yes, I’m referring to Khanh Huong Chinese BBQ and Little Shin-​Shin, which are simply terrible).
Chinese is one of the three greatest cuisines in the world, but you’d never know it from the crap being served around the Bay Area these days. Let’s hope enough customers learn from Ching Hua that really good Asian food is worth a little more money, and that Chinese does NOT automatically mean just another cheap greasy meal.

We went on a Friday night and got delicious $ 2 margaritas with orange juice. Mmm… valuelicious! Seriously they were great, and not skimpy with the tequila.
i had sesame beef, my sister got the kung pao chicken and we got won tons (pork), sizzling rice soup and spinach with garlic to share. My sesame beef was amazing. It was spicy, gingery, and perfectly cooked, just slightly sweet. I will be going back for this dish. The kung pao was good, but not the best I’ve had.
The service was fantastic, and they were nice when my mom sent back her tea smoked duck. She was expecting a Chinatown style (Canton-​style) duck; this one was deep fried after being smoked. As an aside the presentation on the duck was beautiful.
Portions are great, and we didn’t have to wait too long (less than 10 minutes) for our table. My only complaint was that it was very loud. They pack a lot of people into a fairly small space.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed certain things, that would land others in the same predicament of giving this place one star.
We came here once, last year. It was so delicious that we decided to come back around Christmas time again this year. I don’t remember what we ordered, but this time was definitely horrendous.
I understand that they’re trying to do a modern take on Chinese food, a certain type of Chinese food at that, but I get the feeling they’re trying a bit too hard. If I could sum my meal up, it’s that it each had a weird texture. The only thing we really enjoyed was the rice and spicy lean chicken, which was more okay than enjoyable. My mom was still hungry and my sister is still sick a couple hours later.
The thing that bothered me the most is that they are SO short staffed. Maybe it was an off night? Maybe it’s the holidays and they’re trying to cut back on payroll? I don’t care what it was, it was ridiculous for a business to operate like that. The ONE bartender was seating people, making drinks, and taking orders. The ONE waitress was bringing the wrong plates to the wrong tables. And the ONE server was clearing the tables and setting them again and would once in a while take orders. I remember the last time coming here, I saw 5 chefs on the other side of the restaurant. There was nobody there, except a couple of people that went in and out once in a while. This is a problem and really needs to be evaluated.
My dad likes the 3 for $ 10 margarita deal, so that is probably the only reason we’d come back. But I’d advise against it.

1* for delivery & no MSG hangover.
Yesterday was my FIRST successful attempt after two tries.
Attempt 1: called to ask how long delivery would be and I let him know I would call right back after I looked over the menu online. A minute later I called back. I dialed for 10 minutes straight and he wouldn’t pick up the phone!!! He finally picked up the phone and then hung up on me. I was fuming. Seriously?! WTF!!! Yeah okay I was being a little schizo on the guy, but he’s the face of the biz, that’s horrible biz. At least tell me the truth, you’re too busy to take a delivery order.
Attempt 2: arrive at 11:30am, door is wide open, but no one is at the host stand. Hours posted say 11:30am, staff are mopping and cleaning. They proclaim, they open at NOON. Don’t post your hours for 11:30am then.
Attempt 3: SUCCESS!!! Delivery came in a timely manner.
Too bad the God honest truth is, that it’s pretty horrendous Chinese food:
–Mu shu, alright, weird TORTILLAS, I liked how they had julienned scallions
–Chow mein, good chewy noodles, not much flavor
–Siu mai, really off in taste, inedible
–Har gow, can’t believe it’s legal to serve this stuff, it was frozen food
–Scallop and Spinach dumpling, bland, edible, but still landed in the garbage
–Pea Sprouts, it’s the small sprouts, so stringy, should NOT be priced at $ 8
–Mongolian Beef, low quality meat, but edible and there was heat
–Won Ton, flat broth, eh dumplings, edible
–Steam Fish was not what I envisioned, it was filets of low grade white fish, very similar to catfish, for $ 14
$ 98 including tip and tax. THREE of the nine dishes ordered are sitting in my trash now.

I definitely recommend the Cherry Pork and Garlic Buo Tsai Noodles.
The Combination Chow Mein, Combination Fried Rice, and Sweet & Sour Pork are good as well.
I have been here countless times.
Ching Hua is One of the Best Chinese Restaurants in Alameda.

What this place does best is delivery.
This is a branch of the Shen Hua in Berkeley. It is a much smaller restaurant but was made to cater to people ordering from home, either with takeout or delivery.
My grandma lives in Alamda and many times when we have a family gathering at her place we order delivery from here because it’s something the whole family can agree on. Everything is really good and reasonably priced. The guy who owns it is very nice too. We’ve known him for a long time and he’s always been super good to us.
The actual restaurant is really nice too. Well decorated and well lit. There isn’t too much room to sit, and even less room to wait for a table if it’s full, but once again they’re all about delivery.
If you live in Alameda and are feeling like getting some Chinese delivery then give Ching Hua a call. You won’t be disappointed.

We do not frequent most chinese restaurants in general because of allergies to MSG in the family, but once we found Ching Hua we became regular customers — I mean weekly. The food is always fresh — plenty of different flavors on the menu so we are never tired of the food (remarkably!). The service has always been outstanding — friendly, warm, efficient. They always take very good care of us here — but not in a way that slights other customers. The bar is *great* — really good drinks at this place. The price is very fair considering that we always go home with food that will make another full meal. The atmosphere is great too — love the large windows and high ceilings. Highly recommended.
Try the happy hours from 5pm to 7pm daily when drinks and appetizers are on super special! This is a great way to keep the bill down and still have a fantastic meal.

*1.5 stars*
I like the interior décor/​ambiance and the fact that the restaurant really does seem to *try* hard, but after that everything else is hit or miss…
Their prices are kinda high and while portions are pretty good sized, flavors are rather uninspired and bland. To be honest I like little «hole in wall» places like Dragon Village here on the island more when it comes to the taste of the actual cuisine and overall value.
The waiters all seemed really stressed out running around everywhere like chickens with their heads cut off. The bald, eye-​glass-​clad oriental man (waiter/​bartender/​owner?) was so spastic and quick in motion that he made me tired just watching him go (and, not to mention, nauseous). He especially needs to slow down so he doesn’t hurt himself or others!!!
While seeming undestaffed and stressed out, the service wasn’t all that BAD, though.
What really made me almost rate ‘em 1 star was what I saw when I walked to the back of the place to find the restroom. A member of the kitchen staff was sliding out a huge, uncovered tray of walnuts (or some other kind of nut, not sure) from the FLOOR (under some sort of metal rack) and about to start using it for cooking…
Yes, it’s true, they keep trays of exposed food ingredients directly on the floor (vulnerable to dust/​dirt probably being kicked up on it and who knows what kind of insects crawling around in there!!!). Why not at least wrap it up first??? Maybe there’s something I don’t know, but from what I blatantly saw, it was gross!!!
All in all, I wouldn’t come back here. If they improve on customer service (hire more floor staff and make sure they’re calm, casual, friendly waiters, not spazz/​overly serious ones), lower the prices some, and keep the food ingredients clean and sanitary, maybe someday I’ll consider giving them another try…
(Very unlikely, though.)

I like greasy, prepared in an old Asian woman’s basement, not 100% sure about the ingredients, Bay Area China Town Chinese food just as much as the next girl… but I’ll tell you what, if you want some Chinese food that absolutely doesn’t include cat (how boring), make your way over to Ching Hua.
The atmosphere is pleasant and enjoyable, the food is fresh, comes in perfect «sharing» portions and is wonderfully authentic. None of that California, new-​age, hippie, health shit going on. The food is fried, battered, and sweet and sour, yet doesn’t immediately make you feel like you have to go have your arteries cleared before a heart attack is imminent.
They have a full bar and a menu with a huge selection of oriental goodness that includes daily specials.
We enjoyed the pot stickers, the beef & broccolli, the sweet & sour chicken and the white sticky rice. Normal everyday Chinese fare that was surprising more tasty than the norm!
I’ll definitely be back.