Chef Liu Mandarin Cuisine

Thank god they are closed for renovations. I was devastated when I stopped by to see they were closed!

Heads up this place isn’t open. Closed for renovations. Says on the door they’d be done in July. Not the case.

Very disappointing. The house special dish is not good. Seafood is not fresh, and there is no cooking art/​skill involved. It seems that they just dumped things together in a pot. The portion is small for its price– it is pricy. The service is terrible. We went in and sat at a table with no plates or glasses, and they did not provide those until we asked for it. We spent $ 23 per person and had a terrible meal. Will not visit it anymore.

The food is good, but the service is great! It’s hard to dine out with a baby, and the staff at Chef Liu’s made our experience stress-​free! They let us put our stroller in the back, they brought put our food relatively fast, and they even gave our baby a cute little hat!
The food was the best Chinese I’ve has on Castro. My husband loved the black bean noodles and was talking about for the next few days.
Thank you for being so family-​friendly!

Chef Liu shut down Merv’s Lounge. The Bay Areas premier dive bar. If you’ve been to Merv’s or know about it, if you know the importance of a city’s dive bar, if you love your own watering hole BOYCOTT this restaurant!

Great food at a reasonable price and friendly service.
The Kung Pao chicken was the hottest ever. They chopped up the firecracker peppers and mixed them in. It ripped my face off but it was good. The walnut prawns were very good as well.
Will be back when my sinuses require another Kung Pao treatment.

Not great. I came here in a group of 6, and we agreed that the food was sufficient but not worth coming back for. The twice cooked pork was particularly bad being mostly just salty. The spicy garlic eggplant was the best of the bunch, though.
I recommend heading over to Queen House if you’re looking for Chinese food on Castro. I think it’s generally cheaper, and the food is better.

Disappointed. Garlic-​flavored squid used to be my all time favorite dish on Castro street. Had it today-​soooo salty that I could not finish and had a headache by the end of the meal. Maybe that was because there was no air conditioning and feels like 85 degrees in here…
In any case, would have been more forgiveable had the price not also
jumped up to $ 13!
All good things end at some point lol.

Although, my hostess had a sweet demeanor, this place has really bad service and poor quality food.
I had my dish come up very salty so I had to send it back. Then it can’t back with a hair :(
I will certainly not go back again.

Not a place for authentic Chinese food, but maybe enough for American taste…
I can only give a 2 star, nothing really special, only at a good location.

Dropped by here for lunch since I walked past it couple times on Castro when I am on lunch break.
I ordered the honey walnut prawns lunch special. After halfway eating through the entrée I noticed that what i was eating wasn’t really prawns instead it was just chicken shaped like prawns in honey and mayo sauce. Since I was pissed off, I just paid and left. Not sure if they messed up my order by accident or tried to deceive me in imitation prawns.
The lunch special is priced on the high side which is $ 9. I would not come here again fa sure.

No go, period!
Unilocal complains the the review is too short. What else you want me to say?

The 4^th-​star here is largely due to the confidence that my colleagues (at the HQ of our nearby software employer) placed in Chef Liu’s food. The kung pao chicken was satisfactory but nothing spectacular. I gave some attention to the other entrees at our table for 8 and it all looked up to snuff.

Pretty standard «americanized» Chinese Food. Came here for lunch the other day, and it was as expected. Living in the San Gabriel valley of Los Angeles, it’s hard to find better chinese food without going to Asia.
Chef Liu was exactly what one expects from a restaurant like this. Reasonably priced, slightly on the salty side, and probably not very healthy. We had the Walnut Shrimp (sweet as expected), The General’s Chicken (not sure what General, but it was nice and spicy), and Sesame Chicken (fried and tasty!).
I would probably come back again, if this is what I was craving. The sweet and sour soup hit the spot.
The worst item that we got was the dumplings. The skin was very thick, and the filling was not very tasty. I would reccomend not getting the dumplings. Stick with the wok cooked items.

This is literally the worst restaurant I’ve ever been to in my entire life!
Came here to order food to go. Literally waited an hour after the waiter kept telling me «just another minute» 5 times. The table that came in 40 minutes after we ordered got their food and was almost done eating by the time I got my order. They didn’t offer me tea or anything while I waited. The total for my one hour wait for chicken chow mein, beef broccoli, sweet and sour soup and general chicken was $ 45!!! Insanely expensive! Then when I got home my bag was leaking. Oh and my order was wrong. The general chicken was some kind of chicken and broccoli in a runny sauce. So I called them to get the correct one delivered since I’m just a block away and they wouldn’t deliver the correct one. I will never go here again. Oh and the food wasn’t very good. Hope I don’t get sick from this later.

That sizzling rice soup hit the SPOT. The broth was so perfect… not overly salted and tasted like mom’s natural homemade chicken broth. YUMS.
I also had the spicy wontons, which were delicious as well. Perfectly spicy and not too oily like some other places.
Will definitely make this a reoccurring restaurant at my work’s lunch take-​out rotation!

I first came here when my parents drove me up from SoCal to enter my freshman year at Stanford. I forgot what we got exactly since it was so long ago, but I remember getting a soup and three dishes, one of them Mongolian beef. It consists of beef and vegetables served on a bed of crispy rice noodles. The owner was very nice; upon hearing the purpose of our trip, she gave me tidbits of advice on living in the Bay Area and at the end served us complimentary Thai teas.
I returned here with a bunch of college friends. I remember the Hunan lamb and crispy eggplant as being among the dishes we had; the eggplant was especially good.
Some time later I needed to make a bike trip to Sunnyvale, so I decided to stop here for lunch along the way. I got the Mongolian beef because of how much I enjoyed it last time. It was a little too salty compared to last time, but still done very well.
⁸²⁄₁₀₀

We visited Chef Liu at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon with the intention of getting some Chinese takeout for dinner. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that their lunch menu was still available until 430pm (even on weekends)!
The prices here are definitely affordable, $ 7.95 per dish for the lunch menu, which comes with rice, drink and soup (soup is not available for takeout). We ordered the:
— eggplant with minced pork — well done. the eggplant was nicely cooked so it didnt become too soft or mashy
— walnut prawn — decent
— seafood tofu — this dish was slightly disappointing. there were more vegetables than seafood or tofu :(
Nonetheless, we appreciated the great service even though the restaurant was empty at such a weird hour. The waiter served us ice water (since it was a rather hot day) and also fortune cookies :)
Would definitely come back here again for my Chinese takeout!

So disappointing. Bf loves beef rolls, so when we walked by one day and saw them on the menu, we made a mental note to come back the next time we were craving Chinese. So, we did, and of course we ordered them, along with spicy wontons, chives pastry boxes, dry fried green beans, and black bean noodles. Not a single one was good :(
The wontons had way too thick of a sauce on them, and the beef rolls were rather bland, with too much cucumber (to make up for the little bit of beef?). The chive boxes weren’t authentic, and as bf put it, «your mom makes them better with a tortilla». The green beans were so salty I couldn’t even eat them without washing them in my tea first, and the noodles were on the blander side, though probably the best dish of the whole meal. I felt bad because the guy kept coming over to ask if everything was okay /​did everything taste good, and we just nodded yes because we’re Asian and non-​confrontational like that. Despite all this, though, we did end up taking the green beans and leftover black bean sauce home (and created a much yummier noodle dish, if I do say so myself) and ate everything else (again, we’re Asian so we never waste food!!).
Oddly enough, there was a table next to us of what appeared to be regulars, and they LOVED the food. They even had a dish named after them! Of course, ⁴⁄₅ of them weren’t Asian, so…
Sadly, this is just another example of Unilocal not being the most reliable when it comes to Asian food. (I still love you though!)

This place is such a cute restaurant! I ate at another Chinese restaurant on Castro a few weeks before coming here to give it a try. It’s a bit pricey for a Chinese food restaurant, but then, it is on Castro street! We ordered:
— Beef noodle soup which was a bit spicy for my taste, but good enough that I still had to eat it
— Salt and pepper squid. This was so tasty! The squid isn’t the weird, hard texture that you get from other restaurants, this was perfect! Had to be my favorite dish.
— Hot and spicy wontons — I did not touch at all. Based on their color and my boyfriend’s warning, I didn’t try them. He reports that they were quite tasty though.
— I forget the name of this last one in english, but it’s like a sandwich (but it’s not with bread but more of an asian pancake type thing?) with beef and a little bit of hoisin sauce inside.
Overall, I really liked this place and will be coming back again some time!