Dear Chengdu - Irvine

A good place to try some Sichuan life. the server don't really speak English, so they have someone who speaks mandarin in their group. there are pictures, but some things can not be explained (like spicy flats) with only pictures. the interior of the restaurant is like a concrete parking garage that someone with tables is cleared and cleaned. the food tasted quite good and my favorite was a dish with cauliflower

Dishes and environment are good, just the place was a little bit small.

Usually good food but went there last night for a take out order and they were closed even though it said they were open online. I asked someone at the restaurant next door if Dear Chengdu had closed and they said yes. It was disappointing to hear that because my family really enjoyed their food.

Let me explain the wildly different reviews of Dear Chengdu. The excitement starts when you make a reservation on the web page and then find out via a phone call that whoever does the online reservation can 't really reserve at the restaurant. (They were nice and called me to let me know that). As you walk in you notice that the place has all the ambiance of a clean garage with picnic tables, but the food on the tables looks interesting. The waitress doesn 't really speak English, so I suppose it 's authentic, but most menu items have nice big pictures and she make us point to each item. She doesn 't seem to know that the restaurant serves beer (which I like with hot food) but her male partners seem happy to bring some. The cumin lamb was a big hit. Unlike some other restaurant 's cumin lamb toothpick lamb, the chunks of lamb were big enough and cooked perfectly so you were eating meat with a charred exterior rather than pure crispyness. Pepper steak was OK, but something I could do at home. The boiled fish was nice and spicy but somehow the fish fillets seemed very soft and fell apart, and didn 't impress. Maybe frozen fish? We had a vegetarian with us, so we ordered something like sauteed vegetables . What came wasn 't what we expected under a crepe or maybe just a very flat disc of scrambled egg, there were a lot of noodles and very few vegetables. It could be that we had an ESL problem with the waitress here and didn 't get what we thought we ordered? So in summary, the food is OK, and if I lived in Irvine, I 'd probably go there or order takeout delivery. But as I live further away, I 'll probably be checking Google maps to see whether driving to Alhambra to Chengdu Taste is worth the extra drive time.

3/5 lunch experience. Definitely no the best Sichuan food in this area. The “twice cooked meat” have some very weird taste to it, the meat is slightly over cooked. But the other dishes are somewhat standard. Also the price is pretty unreasonable; pretty expensive for a meal for 2. overall not so “dear”. Lol