Bamboo Garden

Great food, great owners. Our server was not so great. She used my own water to put out the flame for our meal once we were done with it. I wasn’t done with my water. Our server was kind of rude but the food was delicious and the owners couldn’t be nicer! Would definitely recommend.

So, I’ve eaten here twice now (once alone and once with family). Both experiences were good, but not overwhelming. The food is standard Chinese restaurant fare. It comes out quickly to the table, and is tasty, but again, standard fare and nothing that you would normally go out of your way for.
The difference maker for me is the people running the restaurant — the servers are always very friendly, and an older woman (who I believe may be the owner) always welcomes you and makes conversation. The people are nice, the food is pretty good and not horribly expensive. That’s just about all you can expect from your standard strip-​mall restaurant, if even that, so this place gets high marks from me for what it is.

I have been coming here since I was little! Being born and raised in South Austin, this was a must and we were always here for Chinese New Year. I love the Egg rolls, Hot and sour soup, corn soup, dumplings, sesame chicken, mongolian beef and mo shu. But their fried tofu appetizer is one of my most faves! it’s fried with a corn starch crispy batter on silken tofu and has a spicy ginger sauce that you could lick the plate clean kid of taste!!!

I just love this place lots of food for a reasonable price. Is sweet and sour chicken is wonderful egg rolls is just wonderful

Pepper steak was good! The carrots were awesome! The rice was not good at all, neither was the wonton soup or egg drop soup. The egg drop soup was a bit better than the wonton though. The sweet and sour chicken was good… typical. the steak with snow peas was very good. Very fast delivery!

My husband and I ordered the sesame chicken with fried rice and the crab rangoon. We got it to go and were pretty disappointed once we dug in at home. The sesame chicken was just large chunks of dark meat that did not taste fresh and my husband threw away his crab rangoon after only one bite. I was also put off by the small thing of hot mustard that came with our order, it was very dried out and had a ring of sticky goo around the lid. We use to frequent Bamboo Garden a few years ago and hadn’t been in awhile, now we remember why.

The lunch is standard but you have the warm welcome of the Grandmother who runs the restaurant. The meals come out spot in each time.
Try the fried tofu with extra sauce. The are the only place that I know of that makes this delicious appetizer. You will want to order extra to take home.

The delivery was fast, the food was bland and everything had the same taste, peanuts for almonds on the chicken that I think was turkey.

So, it’s not like I have very high standards when ordering American Chinese delivery — I fully anticipate consuming some greasy, MSG-​laden, but delicious nonetheless food and I have to say that this was the worst Chinese I’ve ever had in my life. So much bleh.
Ordered curry chicken — no white meat, only fatty chicken thighs. The fried rice basically contained two ingredients — soy sauce and a few stragglers of egg. The orange chicken tasted watered down. The only edible parts of our meal were the vegetables that came in our entrees and the egg rolls. I basically eat anything so it’s kind of saying a lot that I couldn’t come close to finishing the meal.

This place is close to my house, and I wanted to like it because it’s so convenient. The people were also very nice, and the service was good, but the food just wasn’t good. It was bland and tasted like it had all been pre-​made and delivered by a very mediocre food distributor. Maybe if they spice it up or give it more of a unique flavor, but for now it’s a no go. Sad b/​c nice people!!!

Avoid unless close to starvation!
Bamboo Gardens, Austin, TX, rated awesome by our hotel, Hampton Inn, it was anything but. First it took my wife what seemed like 10 minutes to get them to understand her cell number and order. Then they called her back butchering her name so bad she thought it was a wrong number. Then we thought it might be them confirming the order so she called back. Sure enough the wrote the credit number wrong and it did not go through. At that point we said we would pay cash.
I ordered the house fried rice and wonton soup. Both were 1 star at best! She ordered veggie fried rice which did not have many veggies. And, no lite soy sauce only regular. There must have been a shortage of soy sauce as we only got 3 packets for the two of us.
Eat at this place only if your one step from starvation or are having a major diabetic Sugar low!
Keep in mind this was delivery. We did not dine in actual restaurant.
V/​r,
Marty Weber,
iCloud

Just paid $ 5 for 4 empty wantons. It was supposed to crab rangoon. The rest of my food (garlic eggplant) was ok, but over priced for what you get. The search for good Chinese food continues…

Family favorite restaurant. They have the best, freshest egg drop soup I’ve ever had! Their sesame chicken is good, as is the orange chicken. My kids like the kids sweet n sour chicken and s&s fish (sauce on the side of course!) Great egg rolls! A great family friendly restaurant. My family has been reading here for as long as I can remember.

On travel in Austin and forced to stay closer to the airport instead of downtown. No rental car and lack of taxis resulted in delivery for dinner. Bamboo Garden sounded better than pizza.
I ordered crab rangoons, shrimp balls, and s&s chicken with steamed rice. Total came to over $ 30. Food arrived in 45 minutes, still warm. The rangoons were empty pockets of fried wonton, no filling. The shrimp balls were left in the fryer too long and very tough to chew. The s&s chicken was edible but not great. Small crispy pieces of scraps, I ended up with more fried batter than actual chicken.
Final thought: over priced less than moderate food. If I didn’t spend almost $ 40 (includes tax and delivery fee), I wouldn’t care enough to post a review. It was my Unilocal duty to warn others.

Meh! I always judge an asian restaurant by how fresh their vegetables are. In this case — not fresh at all! I ordered the Kung Pao Tofu & Vegetables with steamed rice. This is marked ***: which means SPICY! Not only was it not spicy — the kung pao sauce had an off-​taste. The tofu was ok, but definitely not anything to write home about.
Are there any good asian restaurants in Austin? If you have a suggestion, please let me know. I’m dying for half-​decent asian food.

GROSS! So disappointed. Ordered the Kung Pao Chicken. Not only was the sauce NOT spicy the chicken was riddled with fat.
While the lady did refund my money, I had to endure be ratings of how she’s been cooking it that way for 38 years and no one has ever complained.

We stopped to get some to go food on shift, and we shared our plates… Everything was AMAZINGLY delicious, we had curry chicken, steamed dumplings, shrimp lo mien and fried calamari. The calamari was huge, and truly outstanding. I have never had better calamari, it was so incredible. Definitely recommend, and I hope to be back soon. Yum yum! Also the portions were more than substantial, prices were very reasonable.

I have no idea how this place has so many good reviews. The staff is friendly, the food is cheap, and the service is fast — however, the food was awful. It was such a bummer, I was really looking forward to sitting down on this rainy afternoon and enjoying some yummy affordable Chinese food. The egg roll had a strange flowery taste to it… almost as if it had perfume spritzed on it or something. The egg drop soup was bland, no taste, and almost 100% translucent — not the thick yellow egg filled soup I am used to. Maybe that’s just an Americanized version of egg drop soup and this stuff was the real deal. Either way, not my favorite. I also ordered the vegetable lo mein — again, very bland. There was quite a bit of brown sauce that had little flavor at all, and was very sub par.
It is unfortunate that my experience was less than ideal. I don’t mean to be harsh, I just wish I had seen a review like this one before deciding to eat here. Maybe it was just an off day? Either way, I do not think I will be returning :-/

Was recommended to go here to try Indo Chinese food. They had a lunch buffet that was going on. Surprisingly, you wouldn’t think it is a buffet with the lack of variety of pans out there. Their lunch buffet consisted of about 10 pans and one dessert: ice cream with crispy sweet toppings to sprinkle on it.
The sauce + chicken or veggies in each pan were mediocre. There was barely a difference from each sauce that you figured they just cooked everything in the same sauce and spread it out to each pans with different produce or protein to look different.
The décor was nice with bamboo sticks, service was OK.
Maybe I’ll go here and try the individual dishes instead as other Unilocal reviews had some good reviews on those.

Appearances can deceive.
Bamboo Garden looks like it is going to be a horrible restaurant … but it actually is a quite solid little pleasure.
It is in a frankly run down strip mall off of Ben White.
(For out of towners, Ben White is not the culinary mecca of Austin. The second best restaurant on Ben White might be Long John Silvers.)
The building is shabby and in great need of repair … and the sign in front is not much better.
So this is a place one might expect a very cheap Chinese buffet of stale econo ingredients just slapped together.
The first good sign is that there is no buffet.
(i.e. everything gets cooked to order.)
The second good sign is that there are a lot of locals eating in the place.
The third sign — that could go either way but is great here — is that the menu is very very retro.
This is the kind of Chinese restaurant you could have eaten at in 1964.
Cantonese staples like chow mein and egg foo yung rule.
There is only the most token concession to tofu.
And yes — they have pu pu platters.
Even better yet — the execution on this 1964 menu is excellent.
Vegetables are absolutely crisp and perfect. (i.e. they were not wilting in a wok waiting to be served three hours later. They were done up straight.)
They use decent beef rather than shoe leather beef.
They often use peanuts instead of the cashews we have come to expect in many chinese dishes.
(and yeah … peanuts are cheaper than cashews.)
However, these are fresh high quality peanuts with a lot of taste … that beat a lot of the «texture-​but-​no-​flavor» cashews you get at inferior Chinese restaurants.
So the peanuts are more of a tie in to the «traditional 1964′ theme — and in that light they work very well.
Is this the one restaurant you would want to eat at if you had one and only night before you left Texas? Probably not.
But if your office was near here, or you lived in the neighborhood, you could easily eat here weekly as part of the routine and be very happy.
And if you remember the old Chinese restaurants of an earlier era … and want to have all the memories come back to you in a rush …
this is a great place to do that.
If my grandparents were alive, they would be ecstatic with this place.
And I would happily join them for dinner.