A & L Chinese Restaurant

A nice little Cantonese restaurant in town. We were so glad to give it a try and liked it. Now we don’t have to travel far away to get dim sum!
They also made their own dim sum buns! We tried pineapple buns, egg custard buns, steam pork buns and turnip cakes. Everything was good! I definitely see us going back again!

Got takeout from this place tonight, and it was terrible. The hot & sour soup was not edible beyond half of a spoonful, the sesame chicken was bland and cold, and the «spring roll» was actually a deep fried egg roll. Absolute garbage. Do not give this place your money.

This is the worst Chinese restaurant ever. Terrible service and some dim sums were not fully cooked. I don’t know why some people gave the place such a high rating.

I love the traditional Canto food here. They make their own noodles for chow fun and the dim sum isn’t the frozen kind that they heat up but made from scratch. I gave it 4 stars because the Americanize food taste alright not the best. If you want good pricing and Canto food with wok hei this is your place, but if you want sweet and sour or orange chicken go to panda or some other chinese franchise.

Excellent food. Absolutely delicious. I would love to see them add roast duck, pork, and BBQ pork to the menu! These I can get at MK. Not as wickedly busy. Or crowded.

I’m a little confused as to how this place received such raving reviews. The dine in and dim sum must be a whole other experience; that is the only thing I can come up with…
My wife picked up some to go here and we were not impressed. We had the Seafood congee and Crispy fish w/​special sweet and sour sauce. We couldn’t finish either of them. The congee (which I’ll say I haven’t had before) smelled like a pet store and tasted like nothing special. The crispy fish was more rubbery than crispy and was not like any crispy fish I’ve ever tried before; and not in a good way. To top of the experience, somehow we ended up paying $ 22 for the 2 dishes we ended up tossing in the trash. Being that our kitchen was under construction we ended making a second trip out for dinner.
I really don’t know if I can give this place another try but reading some other reviews and seeing «some» of the pics make me feel like it’s a different restaurant when dining in so I threw on an extra star for now…

Tried dim sum here recently.
I have a new dim sum place.
I will abandon, with glee, the packs of rude hyper aggressive ravenous wolves at MK for this place.
The selection is a little bit limited but most of what I like is here and it is delicious. Prices are very reasonable and the food is every bit as good, and in some cases, far exceed the other place for dim sum.

The staff at A&L are helpful and friendly. Feels great hearing Cantonese again. As for the dimsum service — you’ll get the basic plates, har gow, shrimp noodle, shumai, sticky rice chicken, chicken feet. There are plates I’m not a fan of, but there are many options that you’ll find enjoyable. The dessert options? This dimsum place can bake. Try their egg tarts, roast pork buns, and redbean sesame balls. I’ll be coming back the next time I’m on my way to the city!

On our way out of town from Minneapolis, we had a hankering for some Dim Sum. Unilocal to the rescue for recommending this gem on the way down South!
To start, they open at 10 AM on weekend days, which gives all interested an additional hour of dim sum delight!
The digs here are nothing super impressive, but did have that «ah, this may have been a pizza place at some point» allure. The large goldfish in the tank up entering are lovely and gave our little dude something to check on periodically through the meal.
Now to the food. The tea was legit, free range loose leaf, crap in the bottom of your cup tea. Our waiter made sure that was okay and, of course, it was. Since we showed up at the equivalent of a 4 pm grandparents special, we were greeted with sweets to begin. The egg tarts and custard rolls were amazingly good. Just a little warmth on the custard roll was perfect.
Next, we were greeted with a host of favorites. Shrimp balls with crunchy wonton strips on the outside. These were boss! Great stuff to munch on before you get to the good stuff. I’d never seen these previously, but they’re something I’ll order again. The Char Siu Bao was solid, though a bit on the drier side from a bread perspective, though it was made up for by the baked version which was perfectly done! The shumai was lovely as well and came in a group of 4. The best part of the meal however was a the congee — this was as good as I remember having in Shanghai. Perfect amount of flavor, a good amount of pork and egg and served at a perfect temperature — nothing worse than leaving most of your mouth skin with the first bite!
All in all, this was a great find. The variety was excellent and the only thing keeping it from a 5 was the lack of soup dumplings. The service, food and availability were excellent as was the price! We got out for ~$ 30 with tip and fed three of us as much as we wanted. Worth checking out if your going up to Minneapolis, leaving town to go south or just looking for a solid Dim Sum spot that opens a little earlier than you’re used to!

My family always goes here. It may not look the prettiest or it can be super quiet but the food is always good. They have very friendly service.
My favorite is the salt and pepper squid. It’s so big and has the good salty taste. Very cheap for the portion you get! Also the lo mien! You won’t go wrong! I’ve had a lot of their food and those two are my top.
Again don’t get scared on the atmosphere the food will be amazing!

Save your energy, time, money… Ordered from here for lunch today and will not make that mistake twice. You just never know because these little hole in the walls can be the best thing ever or what i experienced. I got my old stand-​by sweet and sour chicken — i got big hard deep fried balls of tough chicken meat – and some brown/​grey fried rice that somebody took a heavy hand with the soy sauce too. The egg roll was tossed out after one bite. It was on the more expensive side too for this type of place.

Love how they have dim sum on the weekdays! The food quality is almost like mandarin kitchen, just not that much variety. A lot of their dishes was just shrimp.
Chicken feet and crab balls were delicious. Definitely coming back to this place! Don’t let the outside fool you.

My family and I are big fans of A&L. the Hong Kong Fish is AMAZING! Everything we have eaten has been good or great.

Dim sum is great (4,5 stars)
Customer service is great (4 stars)
Decoration is fair (3 stars)

It’s a hole-​n-​the-​wall mom & pop Chinese restaurant in Inver Grove Height. Really authentic, large portion, and reasonably priced. We ordered a 6 course meal deal that came to $ 70. Highly recommended.

We just moved into the town and are exploring all good food here.
Both my wife and I are Dim Sum fan so we have built our list to try over the weekends.
This is a place closer to where we live and we got a coupon from local chinese newspaper so decided to give a try.
Not many people (actually only three other tables) when we went in.
However the food is very fresh and good in terms of dim sum. we ordered the popular stuff like the shrimp dumpling (ha gao), chicken feet, shaomai, steamed spare ribs, etc.
we boxed some extra egg tar and bbq pork bun… lol
definitely recommend this place, in addition to a few other dim sum places famous among the chinese community…
will go back for sure…

A smaller, newer, dim sum joint, there is great potential here I think. They have very limited selection which is a shame I think and don’t really believe in pushing around the carts too often. They pushed the carts around once or twice and that was it. You had to memorize it and just wave people down to bring you what you wanted. They do the rice noodle items as well as the traditional dishes fairly well. The rice noodles are tender and the dim sum are packed full of filling.
If you come here, be cautious on the limited selection and just know that they will charge you for coming to one of the two dim sum restaurants in the twin cities. If you want selection and have the time, may be worth the effort to drive the extra distance and just go to Mandarin Kitchen though.

This place is a hidden gem!
Great prices, delicious food!
I had steam dumpling and wonton soup.
I will be back for the dim sum and beef with brocolli

Great food, good price, nice variety for dimsum. Glad not have to drive far to have good dimsum

Dim sum on the east side! Finally! I love dim sum and the only way I’ve really had good dim sum here is to make the trek all the way over to Mandarin Kitchen. Once there sometimes I have to wait to get a table and during that wait they run out of my favorite stuff and or I get stuck in a crowded area where carts hit me.
This is a closer place to get access to very well made small dishes of very good Chinese dumplings and tapas. The shrimp dishes came overstuffed with shrimp and the congee was awesome. The «cherng fun»…long noodles stuff with meat, were better than Mandarin Kitchen’s. A & L were much more thoughtful and asked for for tea preference versus Mandarin Kitchen will assume what you want unless you tell them in time. Their short menu items for dim sum were awesome so try these if you want a larger plate of select items. Beef chow fun is very well made.
There are some drawbacks. I showed up at 10:30 thinking to beat the rush but there was never a rush which scared me until I got the food. They have a very limited selection, hitting all of the main staples but unfortunately not covering the plethora of other items offered at Mandarin Kitchen. For instance, A and L only had maybe four types of dumplings and two types of steamed buns. A & L only have 2 to 3 carts and Mandarin Kitchen must have at least 12. Once we did our initial ordering, the trips back became rarer and rarer and we realized that instead of a long slow meal with a few dishes at a time, we should have ordered a bunch at once.
There are limited tables here and by the time we left, at a little after noon, the restaurant was over half full. Mostly Chinese folk too… always a good sign from a proof of authenticity standpoint. From a price perspective, despite the sales (buy ten, then you get 2 free (total of 12) or buy 15 and then you get three free (total of 18)), the price was the same if not a little more expensive (after tip) as Mandarin Kitchen (tip always included in price).