T C Garden Restaurant

I love this place. It isn’t too oily or too salty. Instead, it serves quick savory meals at a killer price. Their portion sizes are generous. Because of TC Garden’s proximity to all my classes, I find myself turning to this place whenever I have a time crunch and need something filling to last me through the busy day. The people who work here are friendly and kind as well.

Given the low price of their entrees, the portion sizes are really great. The service is insanely fast: you sit down, and while you are still drinking your complimentary soup, your entrée is already at your table. Great for a quick, filling lunch!

Great authentic Chinese and best bang for your buck around Berkeley! As a first generation Chinese student here at UC Berkeley, I have to say this place really does have that authentic Asian taste and reminds me of home cooking.
My favorite dishes include the duck soup, pork spare ribs, and szechuan fish.

This place can be a great value… IF YOU KNOW WHAT TO GET.
Pork Spare Ribs and Rice
Soy Sauce Chicken
Ginger Onion Chicken
These are my 3 go-​to meals. They’re all dirt cheap and have very generous portions. I used to eat here 4 days a week, and rarely got sick of the food.
I’d probably give this place 2 stars without these 3 dishes. Honestly I’ve experimented with some of their other stuff, and most of it was pretty bad. The quality of the noodle and rice just tastes very cheap, but I guess what can you expect at that price point?
So my tip is, do NOT experiment and just go with tried and true favorites (from here or other reviews). You might find yourself pleasantly surprised.

I got the general tsao’s chicken. It was $ 6.25, which isn’t bad, but the meal was 70% rice 30% chicken. Broccoli had no seasoning, and the chicken wasn’t very good.

Well I guess it’s good in terms of cost performance location! As a UC Berkeley student it’s just right for a quick fulfilling lunch between two classes.

Broth for noodles is always very salty. If you dine in you get a small bowl of house soup of the day. Most dishes are around $ 5-​$ 6, decent enough if you want some quick Chinese food. There is seating but it’s limited, the place is small but cleaner than most of its surrounding restaurants!

Great food, price, and location (to soda, etcheverry, etc.) for a college kid. Service is fast too. Deserves 5 stars on my utilitarian scale. Dine in gets you a little soup cup appetizer always served hot and water without even asking for them. Doesn’t look like much, but for any engineer who prides him/​herself on trying to maximize efficiency, marginal utility, and caloric intake, this is the place. Plus, lots of choices and sometimes even off-​the-​menu options.

Don’t expect more for a 6-​buck dish. But actually not bad flavor. Good for a low-​budget lunch

The most authentic Chinese food I’ve had in the U, S., along with ridiculously quick service (Although I’m not sure it’s good or not) and fair prices

Used to come here all the time when I went to school here. Can’t beat the price and distance to Soda/​Cory halls! I remember getting their #2 combo a lot. The giant chicken leg never disappoints! (especially if you’re a poor college student avoiding dorm food: p)
Today got the stew beef over rice, which is another old favorite. The beef is pretty tender and the portion is very generous. Price is still super cheap, and service is friendly and fast. If you set your expectation properly, and take it for what it is — a super cheap place feeding college students, not a gourmet 5-​star Chinese restaurant, then you’ll be satisfied.

Cheap but the food is C quality. The orange chicken was hard; the garlic noodles were warm but just OK.

Terribly unfriendly people working there, and the food is too oily and without any good flavors. They pretty much just slab a huge amount of dry, grainy white rice on your plate with a quickly, oil-​drenched entrée. Never coming back here again. Only pro I can think of? Price. Most expensive thing here is like $ 7, but I wouldn’t even pay $ 3 for it.

Pretty bad food overall and this place is really dirty in all respects. I eat here because it’s cheap, really fast and convenient but not for the food.

This is the northside location to get super cheap Chinese food, even cheaper than what you can get on southside. During college my classmates and I got takeout from here for lunch several times a week and bring it back to the computer lab, and were pretty much responsible for why the lab always smelled like soy sauce.
Last time I was here, you could get a gigantic box of food for under $ 5. I heard they recently increased their prices, but it should still be way cheaper than anything else you can find in the area. I usually got the beef chow fun here (and they PACKED those boxes), but I think the combo options are more popular. One of my friends always got the one that came with a gigantic chicken leg.
Food quality is usually mediocre, and even places like Lotus House are generally better, but you just can’t beat the prices here.

The worker was cleaning her feet and it was so gross. The surrounding and service were really bad. Dont come here i am sure there are more better restaurants at berkeley.

In a couple words, T C Garden is extremely, astoundingly, unusually… okayish.
To elaborate: As a Chinese kid who grew up in the suburban South Bay and is subsequently a bit of a food-​elitist, I like to pride myself on having a relatively low-​maintenance palatte (nobody’s too good for 4AM Jack In The Box, unless they’re a dirty Communist) that can still recognize good food when it’s there.
Once again having visited T C Garden, I can tick off another Chinese restaurant on the list, and continue to make the claim that compared to what I’ve had in the South Bay, there are no standout Chinese restaurants in the Berkeley city limits, for quality, value, etc., whether we’re looking at 5-​star HK seafood places or hole-​in-​the-​wall Beijing street food shacks. Yeah, I’m even talking about all those other Chinese restaurants that people apparently love here, like Great China, King Dong, Da Lian, and Mandarin Garden.
There are no Chinese restaurants here that will blow you away with how tasty and wallet-​demolishing they are (like some HK seafood places I know), nor are there places that have such great taste and portions that you have to wonder how they’re not losing money (shoutout to Milpitas for that.)
To be fair, I knew full well going in that T C Garden wasn’t supposed to be in the first category (duh), but I had high hopes that as a Northside Asian Ghetto fixture, they should at least fall into the second category. Eh, they were closeish.
For the price, T C Garden provides a fairly large volume of food, although a ton of it is rice. Seriously, the rice plate has to have at least two or three standard Chinese restaurant «bowls» worth of rice in it. For some other restaurants, people are all «OMG I’M SO FULL» while I’m looking at my now-​empty plate of $ 10.50 vegetarian lasagna and thinking «I didn’t pay $ 10.50 to be hungry in two hours.» I can put down quite a bit of food for a dude my size, and T C Garden is actually a contender in providing respectable food volume.
Anyway, I had a fish and eggplant rice plate for $ 6.50 after tax. The eggplant is battered and fried in what I assume is a Guangzhou-​inspired style that leaves the inside soft and moist, but I was rather disappointed by the portions of eggplant and fish. The sauce was a modest, average affair– oily, salty, and a tiny tiny tiny bit spicy, with no real pop or exciting flavor to it. Removing price from the equation, it’s a very «meh» dish. Not amazing, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually dislike it, y’know?
So no, T C Garden is no must-​try culinary Mecca for flavor, but for $ 6.50, this is some of the best food volume to price ratio you can buy at a restaurant in Berkeley, and for that they have my props.

I keep giving this place another chance, and I keep getting disappointed.
Really, there’s very few things here barely worth getting. The spare ribs and rice is alright (although there really is nothing other than spare ribs and rice), and they’re really the only viable place to go if you want wonton/​noodle soup.
Everything else is just poorly made, incompetently seasoned, and obviously not anywhere near fresh.
But you could do so much better just taking out another dollar from your wallet and heading over to any of the other places (unless they’re all closed).

This place is ridiculously cheap, and it’s been around for as long as I can remember. I think there was a time in undergrad when I might have thought TC Garden was okay, especially for the price, but after experiencing so many other gastronomically pleasing options out there, I just can’t dine here without regret anymore.
First of all, the cleanliness doesn’t lend a lot of confidence. There was a bin of dirty cups and dishes set right outside the door. on the ground. The place itself is tiny, with a couple tables inside and some communal tables outside. The lighting is dim and the service is either nonchalant or impatient. The menu is lackluster, but everything is around $ 4-​$ 5, which is really reasonable given its close proximity to campus.
Duck noodle soup:
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I believe this was something around $ 5.50 plus tax, and it is nice that they finally started taking credit cards. The picture is somewhat deceiving, since it doesn’t look half bad. But the pieces of duck were cut in all different sizes and not very fresh, there was random lettuce thrown into the soup (which I’ve never experienced before in duck noodle soup) as filler, and the broth was quite bland. I will say that the noodles were actually cooked quite well, so that they were elastic but cooked through.
If I were starving and maybe hadn’t eaten for a day or two, I think I could come here and bolt the food down. But as a good dining option? I would definitely recommend going somewhere else.

I’m really not sure if I’m just ordering the wrong things. As a regular tenant of Soda Hall, North Asian Ghetto is my go-​to place for a quick meal. I’ve had a bit of a sample from each restaurant, though I never gave T C Garden a try. After recommendations from a few friends, I decided to stop by.
What I was greeted with was a rather intimidating menu. Not knowing what to order, I haphazardly chose one of those Panda Express-​y pseudo-​Chinese dishes. I was met with a rather oily and not very flavorful meal, and it was not at all memorable.
I tried to come again a second time to give it another chance, and again it was rather underwhelming. There’s really not much I can say about this place besides that it really doesn’t do it for me.
I may give this place another chance if I’m ever in the area with a friend. Otherwise, there are just way too many other options in Northside.
TIP: Get what everyone else gets. It’s probably good.