Sam Woo BBQ

Food — traditional and tasty, lets be honest, Sam Woo is probably the only place for some really traditional healthy cantonese food in this area, for the price and the portion we get, I don’t find a better choice!
Service — it was okay, defiantly room for improvement but its also not a place to dine for service.

I grew up eating sam woo’s food for as long as I remember. Now I pass it down to my kids to enjoy their good food. Tonight i ordered 2 dishes to go and waited 30 minutes for them. What makes it worse is that 2 people who ordered to go before me got their food first. I asked the lady who took my order where is my food, she just said it is being cook in the kitchen without any empathy. No one can tell me why my fried rice and noodles took 30 minutes to prepare. It was 9:30 pm and they were not busy at all.
Well, that really ruined my night. My kids were upset that they have to wait that long in the car. They just lost my business as well as the generation after me.
How was the food tasted? Does it even matter with a terrible customer service like that???

Meat is good I ordered a pound of bbq pork. But the service is slow and cashier is rude.

Careful… cash only. Good place, clean, but still didn’t full transition out of the Chinese restaurant fill.
The restaurant has character when the service staff keeps their half eaten food in window displays for customer eyes.
More exciting is hoping that your server doesn’t spit in your food when yelling across the room to any other server. That aside good bbq char Siu. Hits he spot when you have a craving.

I like this Sam Woo, the location is convenient with parking and the restaurant is modern and somewhat fashionable upscale compared to the old school Sam Woo I’ve known for decades. It’s almost like a chic Hong Kong café.
The food is always reliably delicious. My main problem is that there is so much to crave but only a limited appetite and waistline to support indulging in too many tasty flavors. That makes Sam Woo a great place for «family style» dining, sharing many dishes with a larger group of friends or family.
They have nice rice plate specials and you can have lunch for under $ 10 (after tax and tip) easily, and depending on your appetite, maybe take home some leftovers.
If I had one request of Sam Woo, it would be to open up a location in the South Bay Beach Cities, I think they would thrive in Gardena, Torrance and the area. I speculate the South Bay is hungry for authentic Hong Kong Cantonese cuisine at reasonable prices, as there are only a handful and none makes Won Ton Soup as good as Sam Woo!

I had the spicy wonton soup. The wonton was OK but very salty, the soup was spicy hot and also very salty, too salty for me to finish.
I ordered the beef chow fun, flat rice noodles with beef to go, that was very good. Service was fast and they had complementary tea.

Our go to place for all things Chinese BBQ. This location is one of the newer ones in the Valley. The restaurant itself is more modern and dare I say a little cleaner. The lines here are not as long as the one in the 99 Ranch location a few miles away.
When we came here on Saturday to pick up some BBQ Duck for CNYE dinner, they literally ran out of Duck! So it does happen. But lucky for us, while paying for the BBQ Pork, they brought out some Ducks that had just finished roasting.
You can expect to find your usual BBQ Duck, Pork but I think the prices are a little higher here too. Not just the BBQ but also the regular restaurant dishes.
For our wedding rehearsal dinner, we decided to order food from here since it is a lot cleaner but we did notice that on average the dishes were $ 1-​$ 2 dollars more. That’s not much but when you’re trying to feed 80 people and ordering $ 500 worth of food. $ 1-​$ 2 adds up. The ordering process was confusing and left us scratching our head. Everything is hand written and no receipt. We were left to trust that they’ll have our food ready for pick up (they don’t cater/​deliver) at a specific time and date. 2 months after we placed our order, sure enough our food was ready for picked up. All 12 trays.

This is the cleanest Sam Woo BBQ that I have ever been to! The service is usually good and speedy on slow weeknights. The food came really quick.
Their soups are nothing special. I’ve tried some congee and also a wanton soup. However, they’re known for their BBQ pork and duck which is actually very good in my opinion.

I have to say this is the worse Sam Woo I have ever been to. The first time I ate here we ordered about five dishes during lunch and after eating for about 20 minutes we realized that our roasted pork never came. We asked the waiter about it and they told us they were cooking it. Well that is something they should already have prepared and ready to serve to customers being known as the most popular restaurant for Chinese BBQ. And they could have at least told us we would have to wait for it when we ordered it but they didn’t and just made us wait until we almost didn’t want it anymore.
Another visit I had to this Sam Woo was to order the BBQ for take out. Walking in we were not greeted; that is fine and typical of some Chinese places. But we waited and waited and no one came to help. The BBQ chef was busy cutting meat and the cashier just did not acknowledge us at all. She just stood there and waited until someone else came. The manager finally walked in and to tell the BBQ chef that he put the wrong item on a dish and finally came to ask if we needed help. By then we just wanted to get out of there and ordered our food with him while still having to wait for the BBQ chef to finish chopping the order he messed up on previously. Finally getting to pay for our food we asked for extra plum sauce for the duck and the cashier just answered ‘no’ like we can’t have it… we asked ‘what do you mean no?!’ And then she finally told us we had to pay for it and we were totally fine with paying a quarter for extra sauce. Her attitude was horrible and so unpleasant. I would think twice about eating here again and I don’t even want to order take out here anymore.
The quality of the food was okay I would rather order the roasted duck, pork, and BBQ pork at another location since there are plenty of place around this area that offer better service and better food.

No Bueno.
Seriously the worst. There was a bug in my soup. Parking was horrible! …Has Sam Woo’s quality gone down or maybe it is just this place.
Not coming back. :(

Hmm it’s a Sam Woo.
This location is newer and cleaner, with somewhat of a crappy parking lot. Food is consistent when compared to other locations. As of now, I prefer this location just because I think it is still somewhat hidden compared to the location in the same plaza as the 99 Ranch!

My co-​workers and I call this place the new Sam Woo, as it’s the newest Sam Woo that’s opened in a relatively new plaza as well. The look inside the very modern, the most modern out of all the various Sam Woos I’ve been to in SGV. If you’re here for to-​go orders of their duck, there’s a connected separate section for that too.
They can seat groups small and large. Yes, there literally is a table for 1 where you sit by a structure supporting pillar and a large table that can seat 12, which my group has taken over before. Favorite dishes to order include the salt and pepper assorted seafood and the honey walnut shrimp. Lunch orders come with soup (for sure with dine in, unclear about to go orders). The food is decent for the price and it’s a close location for us if we want to go out somewhere quick for Chinese food.

OOOOOOk really surprised myself with this 4 star rating because I’m usually really eh when it comes to Sam Woo. The one in Irvine was whatevs, the other one on Las Tunas (I think?) was whatevs, but this one feels a little different. Maybe it’s newer, maybe it’s not as janky or just I dunno, something about it lol. Actually this one reminds me of Tasty Garden or something, some kinda HK café…? Hm.
So I think Chinese food is pretty good but really not something I crave a lot. So that’s probably why I feel the way I feel about Sam Woos lol but I’d still eat it. I went with a group of friends, and we each ordered a dish (actually one of my friends ordered 2 lol wtf) and daayummm these non-​family-​style dishes are HUGE!
I got a BBQ pork noodle soup and added wontons to it, and it was really filling. Pretty delicious and their famous BBQ pork is tasty. Wontons too. I would ask for sriracha if you like it spicy cos that chill oil didn’t do shit. I also tried my bf’s 3 meat delicacy or something dish (lolol quite a name) and it was yummy too. TONS of rice and a ton of meat piled on top. Flavorful sauce. My friend ordered a beef stew over rice and shared some with me, also yummy! Beef was cooked til it was super tender.
I had a pretty good time eating there, and the food was definitely yummy and you get a huge freakin bang for your buck. I think my dish was like… I dunno, couldn’t be more than $ 7 – 8. Service was also quick and very typical of Chinese restaurants lol. Hmmmm yeah no complaints from me!

First of all, if you are expecting good ambience and great service then this is not the place for you.
If you want comfort food or noodle to satisfy your belly — then enter!
The porridge is very good here with the flavor of the ingredient seeping through — as oppose to the taste of boiled ingredient in plain porridge.
The noodle also is crunchy resembling the noodle in HK — as oppose to soggy and soft.
The BBQ meat is also worth trying.
Otherwise everything else is nothing different from other Chinese restaurants.
I wouldn’t order the steak.
We saw Andy Ricker (owner/​chef of Pok Pok) eating here by himself. I wonder what he ordered?!

Only for TOGO Orders~
Been coming here a couple of times since this place is still new. The service here is so so, you can tell the workers don’t like working there, but they still do their jobs. My last recent visit was horrible though. While I’m waiting in line to order a duck and chicken home, one of the workers skipped me to the guy behind me. I told him I was next, but the guy behind was like «I’m in a hurry». SO? Wait in line like everyone else. The worker didn’t even do or say anything, he just ignored me and continue to take the guy’s order. WTH? Hella rude. Another guy helped me instead. Guess I won’t be coming back here anytime soon.
As for the food, the duck and chicken is okay. Sometimes it has a lot of meat, while other times it doesn’t. As for their sauce Togo, I didn’t really like it, I had better.
Overall, I won’t go out of my way to come here for my chicken/​duck fix anymore. Rude customer service.

When you walk in this place, you probably will think you’re in the wrong place. It’s clean and modern looking… This isn’t the Sam Woo I’m used to. Nice change though.
It seems with the clean venue, you sacrifice the flavor and quality of the food. We ordered half a duck, bbq pork and the beef chow fun. The duck and the bbq pork were just ok, and didn’t seem to have the same flavor as the Sam Woo off Del Mar and Valley. The bbq pork was also super fatty. Don’t get me wrong, I like it fatty, but this was a little too much for me. The beef chow fun was good, and you get a whole heck of a lot of food for the price.
Overall, I would say that it’s probably worth going to the other location unless you really care about having the restaurant really clean and modern looking.

One of my parents favorite place to eat for lunch and they always like to take away the duck or fried pork for dinner. It is located off Walnut Grove and Valley and is considered a new Chinese place. Sam Woo seems like it is located in many different Asian areas in California so it really doesn’t seem hard to find one.
We ordered pork porridge with century egg, mix shredded meat chow mein and a duck wonton. After placing our order we also get a free soup with the meal. After that it was literally a few minutes before our food came. Of course it isn’t all together but it’s still ok since we are sharing.
The interior is pretty nice and clean and everything tasted pretty alright. If you are looking for something fast and quick this could a good spot to come by.
After eating our lunch we took away some fried pork which was pretty crispy you just have to put it in the oven when you want to eat it. :)

It went down two stars:
1. Wasted $ 2.00 for no refill on Thai Ice Tea drink ($ 1.50 for the drink + $ 0.50 charged for it being iced)
2. Deep fried sole fish has too much breading on it. Been here twice and the fish sucks now…

Fairly new location. I stopped in for lunch during the week. Parking is no issue due to the private parking lot. Inside, the restaurant is modern, comfy and clean.
There are daily lunch specials and I chose the roasted pork with shrimp sauce. When received, the entrée came with a large side of steamed rice and the roasted pork entrée was a generous sized portion and yummy. I was definitely full after finishing the entire dish for around the price of a burger combo.
I’ll certainly return here again in the future to and try their other lunch entrees or dinner.

This review is for the BBQ goods only… I had to try this new location as it’s so close to where I live! It was majorly crowded and they were all out of the crispy skin pork at 8pm! I’ll have to try it next time, but I got:
BBQ pork (1lb): Literally half the pound was ⁸⁰⁄₁₀ fat to meat ratio, and the other was super lean. Normally I’d call it inconsistent and no bueno, but it happens that my bf loves the fatty side and I love the lean side, so it all worked out! The char siu itself was not as sweet as most places, nor did it have that sticky, caramelized glaze. This definitely tasted more soy-​saucy and the meat was alternated between greasy and harsh (depending if you got the fat or lean meat). I still ate it up though… I haven’t been picky since I moved to SoCal (I always remembered NorCal having better char siu, but don’t ask me where cuz I don’t remember).
Roast duck (half): The duck was a bit dry and bland, and the duck «au jus» or whatever that soupy thing was that you drizzle over it was bland as well, though it added more anise flavor to the dish overall. It also comes with «duck sauce» and some hoisin thing. At least it was less salty, meaning less sodium intake? I still ate it up – and the duck wasn’t too fatty which was nice.
Overall, it’s more of a 2.5 star as it doesn’t really match with the standards I’ve seen in the 626, but I think it’s bearable since hey, less salt and leaner meat is good, right? Can’t beat the location (beware of parking and the McDonald’s line on the weekends) and convenience, anyway.