Main Garden

Good food, good price. When you want quick, reliable Chinese take out, this is the place. Chicken wings, or Hunan Beef are top notch.

ordered from here on grub hub, not realizing it was the spot next to three sheets. so, so awful. i ordered a tofu dish that was no rancid tasting i asked then to come back with my money.
the order was also wrong on every other count, the wrong sodas, wrong rice and missing rolls.
i would order ANYWHERE else. it could not be worse than this place. :\

This place used to be pretty bad, but passable. The fried chicken was okay, general tso chicken wasnt great but was edible. The place must have changed hands. It is officially the worst chinese food ive had. These people have no respect for food or their customers. I didnt want to feed my dog the leftovers. With so many low cost options in the area there is really no need for this place. Go homeain garden and fill the space with someone who loves food and new haven.

Another run-​of-​the-​mill Chinese restaurant in New Haven. I tend to pick this one over alternatives because it’s pretty fast, and open very late. It’s pretty hard to muck up carb based dishes. Lo mein and scallion pancakes are my go to.
My suitemates and I will regularly order food here and pick up instead of eating at the dining hall. They can be brisk over the phone, but they make the food quickly. You get what you expect– no complaints here.

Fried boneless chicken with garlic sauce is amazing. Huge quantity, super cheap. Not sure what people are expecting from a fast food Chinese place but at this price point, it’s awesome.

Not that great but hey it’s the only Chinese place open this late. They still doing great bc they are the only one open beside pizza. So give them props for that but the food wasn’t that impress.

On a long and convoluted journey across America (and parts of Canada and Mexico), I spent two nights partying in the vicinity of the Hallowed Halls of Ivy that are Yale University. The morning after the second of these nights, I was in need of some cheap, greasy hangover food. Then I stumbled upon this place, a block from my friend’s house. At first glance I thought it was called «Ming Garden.» My Broca’s Area, being the intrepid Sherlock Holmes that it is, saw the Asian-​style lettering, the word «garden,» and a word beginning with the letter M, and assumed it must have been Ming Garden. But no, it’s «Main Garden.» Why, I have no idea. Maybe they wanted to break stereotypes. Maybe they want to distance themselves from the Ming Dynasty, in protest of their canal building policies over a thousand years ago. Or maybe one of their ancestors couldn’t pass the civil service exam and the family has borne a grudge for a millennium.
I noticed that there were especially cheap lunch specials, and the cheap fat kid inside of me jumped at the chance to get pork chow mein for four bucks. I ordered «the pork chow mein lunch special, please.» The lady at the counter yelled something in Mandarin back towards the kitchen. I then heard a small child crying and two adults arguing. This continued while the child’s crying got louder and louder.
I was handed my Styrofoam box of Chinese «food» and happily walked out. But when I opened the box at my friend’s house, there was no chow mein inside. Instead, it was dry fried rice with cubes of chewy pork mixed in, and a side of what looked like iceberg lettuce sauteed in something trying to be hoysin sauce. I tried to finish it. I really tried. I’m reluctant to throw away any food, but this time my conscience didn’t even put up a fight. Ten thumbs down.

Main Garden has the best fried chicken I have ever tasted in my entire life. I dream about their fried chicken.
It isn’t fancy. Just a ½ fried chicken — you can get it with rice or with fries (Proper English style chips, not those pathetic McDonalds style things). But I could start a religion about that chicken, and now that I don’t live in New Haven, I am so sad that I can’t find any chicken anywhere near as good.
The Singapore Mai Fun is good too. As the other people had posted: don’t expect gourmet at rock-​bottom prices. But it’s the tastiest cheap fake-​Chinese food anywhere in New Haven for sure.

I really can’t argue against a Chinese Fast food place that delivers so quickly and provides food so cheaply. They have pretty good, standard egg drop and hot/​sour soup and fried rice (though I think there was once when the rice came slightly uncooked). I really liked their egg foo young the one time i ordered it.

I don’t know what people are expecting from a fast food chinese place. Main Garden is exactly that – a fast food chinese place. I’ve only ever ordered delivery from here so I can’t speak for the in-​store customer service, but delivery has always sat well with me. The portions are great and decently priced. The food’s always come decently hot and greasy. I’ve never found anything to be under or over seasoned. I would definitely recommend any of the lo mein (their added shredded cabbage and bamboo shoots were a pleasant surprise), definitely the fries, crab rangoon (really nice crispiness and more cream cheese than crab), and their fried rice is dark as it should be unlike ivy noodle’s =X.

Ok, I’ll be honest. I’m a huge fan of Main Garden because it’s a Chinese food place that is closeby. I remember when I went to college my friends and I used to joke about how awesome it would be to have a Chinese food place down the block. Well, my secret deep dark Chinese food fetish came true. And I ate (and eat) food from that place like it was (and is) going out of style.
Although all Chinese fast food places make similar dishes, here are the ones to get here that are particularly tasty:
1. Fried Chicken Wings
2. Fong Wan Gai
It’s like chicken wrapped inside pork inside fried dough inside chicken inside pork like a Russian nesting doll.
3. Chicken with Black Bean Sauce
4. And… their french fries:
They basically make their french fries like belgian frites. I think they secretly have access to the fryers that used to be at Rudy’s because they own the building that Rudy’s used to be in. These aren’t your average crinkle fries… they are MAD GOOD. So, go get yourself some of their french fries because they are so good it is dumb and you wouldn’t think that about a Chinese food place, but there it is.

second chance — fried rice, hot sour soup, sesame chicken. all of it disgusting. i started getting a serious stomach ache half way through the 5^th bite. no flavor, yet crazy greasy. wrong wrong wrong.
EDIT:
still have a stomachache a day and a half later. for the first time i threw out the leftovers (not even fit for my dog)
seriously though, the one good thing about this place is that if you ate it everyday for a week, you would have the guts of a cockroach thereby being well prepared for the impending apoca.

Awful food, even for take-​out. Extremely bland, extremely sweet, super greasy food. Do not recommend.

Rancid, doesn’t even begin to encapsulate it all.
Have you ever seen the film «Alien»? If you have, did you ever wonder what a person could eat that would be so persistently horrible that it would make a parasitic organism explosively leap from their chest? an odd question i know, but bear with me on this.
If you have and you have, then i present to you Main Garden. Their ability to screw up even to most common Americanized «Chinese» dishes is staggering, and a monument to the horrible things people will consume when inebriated. Virtually every dish comes steeped in enough oil, that I question if this restaurant is actually a subsidy of BP. Additionally it’s worth noting that all of that putrid grease does induce a similar side effect to Orlistat, which i guess is an additional surprise you get with every order.
So yeah don’t eat at Main garden, ever. there’s better palces in N.H. (cough. Blessingstogo. cough cough…), Though for a bit of viewing fun, you can venture out there late on a Sunday night (say around 11.30) and watch the cookstaff drain five gallon buckets of oil into the nearby gutter.

Let’s be clear — this is a seriously dingy establishment. But they have a soft place in my heart from those long nights studying at Yale. Fried boneless chicken with garlic sauce is like nothing else (hence the extra star). Proximity to Rudy’s also appreciated.

Every once in while you eat food that does not deserve a second chance and, sadly, that’s what Main Garden serves. They are open late, and the folks taking our phone order were nice, and thorough, the delivery was fast, but the food was awful in every way — chow fun, wonton soup, beef with vegetables. Bland when it should have had flavor, chewy when it should have been toothsome, toothsome when it should have had texture, sweet when it should have had bite, not in the least spicy, and so on.
Good if you’re on a diet, I guess. I ate some soup, tasted the rest and then thought to myself, why bother? The leftovers sat in our fridge for days. And that’s a pretty rare occurrence.
Where does the rest of New Haven get Chinese delivery after midnight?

The baseline test of any cheap Chinese takeout restaurant is its General Tso’s Chicken. Main Garden failed. I can forgive the pieces of chicken that were more batter than meat, but where’s the sauce??? Good GTC must have a substantial amount of sauce that coats everything and can be mixed in with the rice. Sorry Main Garden, but I will not be coming back.

In College this was my favorite greasy spoon Chinese food place. Why? Not only was their food better than every other place that delivered to Albertus, but they delivered in a blizzard when nobody else would! Not even Domino’s.
Now that I live down the street and haven’t eaten Chinese food (other than the Iron Chef) in years, I don’t get much delivery. But I wouldn’t recommend eating in there… always take-​out. they have a small space, overly-​bright lights with glass walls and little ventilation.