Ocean Pearl Restaurant

The food is mediocre compared to other dim sum places nearby. The prices are cheap, but so is the quality. if you are coming as a tourist, you may want to go to the places off of pacific street. i barely understood the toisan dialect as a canto speaker, so i can only guess how english speakers are going to order. just know what to expect when you go there.

My aunts love this place and come here pretty often. The tricky thing that most of the good stuff is written on the walls in chinese only. So bring a friend! Some of my favorite things there are the pork spareribs and the claypot rice (which comes with more pork belly and sausage than i’ve ever seen for $ 5).
And yeah, it’s clearly not the cleanest place but if that’s a big deal for you, go to PF Changs.

Meh! Wasn’t the cleanest restaurant as previous reviewer’s said but it was edible. They added lettuce in their chicken fried rice. Who does that? My shrimp har gow was mushy though piping hot. Won’t be back.

Yummy Dim sum… The Shui Mai was great! very flavorful! Nothing was too oily and greasy like other dim sum places usually are. Service was good. You just have to make sure you get there early! We got there at 10am when it opened, and by 10:30am, there was a line outside!

Good gracious, the last and only time I’ve been here was over 25 years ago when my family met my brother-in-law’s family. I swear they haven’t done a thing to the place since… that explains the seriously soiled carpet and sticky yellow walls.
Look, I have been to many restaurants where cleanliness is not a priority and it doesn’t bother me much. This place somehow just made me felt yucky — actually, make that itchy.
There’s a price to pay when you try new places — new in a sense that hubby and I haven’t eaten here before and 25+ years ago memory doesn’t really qualify for a Unilocal review.
We noticed few tables were having dim sum — never knew they served dim sum. I wanted soup noodle on a cold day so we ordered the combination wonton soup fun ($ 5.95?) and a singapore rice noodle ($ 4.95?). While we waited and it was a good 15 – 20 minutes wait which we found surprising especially for a Chinese restaurant… we ordered the chiu chow dumpling. It looked good and tasted ok — not great although they have the right filling, lots of peanuts.
The combination wonton soup fun came with some bok choi (some are brown, which should have been thrown out), squid, shrimp, scallop, straw mushroom, bbq pork and about 6 wonton? The wonton was all meat and tasted a bit odd. The scallop also tasted a bit funny. Overall, the order was very bland.
The singapore rice noodle was a bit too sweet and too wet.
It will likely take another 25 years before I return…

Tuck inside Chinatown its no gem, but very reasonable, so reasonable it was featured in Rachael Ray’s $ 40 a day segment. Dingle 2009 was happening and they were hungry for Dim Sum and with a large crowd Yank Sing didn’t make sense.

Ocean Pearl is the epitome of a typical/​stereotypical Chinese restaurant in Chinatown that is often derided by foreigners. It’s is incredibly dirty and poorly maintained — walls are yellow from oxidation, everything within reach is sticky from grease and spills, chairs and tables are shaky, majority of the bowls, cups and plates are chipped, and the list goes on and on. Despite everything, this is still one of my favourite dim-​sum joints in SF. The food here is simply fabulous. And for this reason alone, this place is always packed, each and every day. The sole reason I ventured into this restaurant was because it was packed with old Chinese people every morning — a very good indicator.
The dim-​sum they serve here is very traditional Hong-​Kong style dim-​sum, untainted by western/​mandarin influences. Everything is slightly on the sweet/​greasy side, but indeed very tasty. Things to try include: har-​gow (crystal shrimp dumpling), shui-​mai (essentially meatball), seafood eggplant, seafood bell pepper, and perhaps chicken feet.
Final notes:
— this place is _​extremely_​cheap, I’d be _​very_​surprised if anyone could eat more than $ 15 in one sitting (usually $ 10 for me, and I eat a lot).
— the service is almost non-​existent, you really have to chase down your waiter/​waitress to get anything.

Ocean Pearl Restaurant was another chinese restaurant that, I have not been to in a very long time. The food is pretty good, I used to remember coming here for Yum Cha and for Dinner several times. The place maybe small and cramped with alot customers it is a good place to eat sometimes you would some tourist people eat here as well.

Horrible takeout service.
My mom had ordered takeout for the «Chinese Greens and Beef Pan Fried Noodles» equivalent to «Gan Chao Ngou Hor» and there was absolutely NO BEEF in the noodles. The menu says BEEF pan fried noodles, not PAN FRIED NOOLES ONLY. When we got home and opened the box, there wasn’t even a full box of noodles. What a rip off!!! We called back to complain only to hear the Chinese woman there yell at us AND hang up on us. (I know what she said because I’m Chinese myself) So of course we kept calling until she re-​answered and then she agreed to reimburse us $ 0.50. Still a rip off.
If it’s BEEF PAN FRIED NOODLES, where the *beep* is the BEEF?!
Rip off, I’m not coming back to this place, and I’m also warning my friends who frequently dine in Chinatown about this.

Awesome here! I don’t really like dining there, but take out is great! Sorta icky inside, but definitely, point at what you want and you will recieve, hot and fresh, and affordable! I love their steamed scallion and ginger chicken (½ chicken) is more than enough. I don’t order their clams anymore only cuz there aren’t enough clams. Tofu is one of my faves. Check it out!

This place is far from the cleanest Chinese restaurant and if you’re expecting a high class clean Chinese restaurant, this isn’t for you, but a lot of Chinatown is like this so take it as it is. This was my great grandmother’s favorite restaurant in Chinatown and we always use this for big family get together meals.
The main problems with the meal were that the «shark fin soup» kinda lacked a lot of shark. So does that mean we just had fin soup? Or just soup? Also the long life noodles were a bit bland, maybe that’s why they’re long life because they never get eaten.
Seriously though, the jellyfish dish was excellent and they made the roasted chicken with nice crispy skin and a sweet tapioca soup to top off the meal. Very sad that we were the only people in for dinner the whole night so glad we were able to give them some business.

I’ve never dined inside Ocean Pearl, but I’ve ordered take-​out from here many a time.
You may have some difficulty ordering in English with the lady up front by the register, but if you can show her what you want from the menu, you should be good to go.
Their Crispy Chicken is some of the best in town.
Their Salt & Pepper Pork Spareribs are a better deal & more generous for the price than Yuet Lee’s.
And their fried rice is pretty damn good too.
Most importantly, you’ll never have to wait more than 10 – 15 minutes… the guys in the kitchen cook at lightning speed.
When I have the craving for some home-​style Chinese food at at good value, I hit up Ocean Pearl.

Surprisingly fresh, good, home style Chinese food and cheap too. Would not recommend for dim sum but good for a simple dinner and so close to the North Beach action.
If memory serves, when we went to dinner, the fried pork was tasty as was the chicken. The wok fried hung choy is done right home style. Dim sum during weekend lunch was just average tastewise but it was cheap.
According Chinese hole of the wall rating system, this deserves 5 stars. This place has the worn round brown tables without tablecloths as well as the squishy chairs. Lots of old Chinese and construction worker patrons. Very cool.
Seems that few people go there for dinner but many show up for dim sum.