Lucky Express

The best find in Bloomington when you consider the value to taste ratio. Don’t let the yellow stained walls fool you. Bring cash. Pick a dish from the huge menu on the wall. Enjoy. The food is pretty oily but just about right for whay It was once described to me as drunk college kid food from the Beijing area. I would believe it.
The dishes cost less than ten bucks and would last (most people but not me) two to three meals. If you dine in, feel free to go up to the rice cooker and shovel more rice on to your plate if you run out. My personal favorite is the eggplant but I haven’t found a dish I dislike yet. Many Chinese students seem to get large bowls of soup like stuff that I’ve never tried but want to.

Really enjoyed this place. My daughter said «they must have just opened here. The walls are still bare.» I think that’s just their decorating style. Lol. Menu is short = easier to choose. CASH ONLY– be prepared. Food is really good and a great price. We enjoyed vegetable fried rice and chicken and broccoli. YUM!

My favorite Chinese restaurant in Bloomington. The value for what you get is amazing, a plate loaded with steamed rice and an amazing entrée from their giant menu of Chinese characters with their poorly translated name underneath (ie scrumbled eggs) for 7 – 15 $. Their lunch deal is also great with ten or so different choices for 5 – 6 $ which begins at opening and ends at 3:30.
Lucky Express’s specialty dish is their chili chicken. Dark chicken meat chopped into knuckle sized portions, battered and fried and tossed into their chili oil. There are options to get this dish with vegetables of sorts but, only chumps order those because the vegetables add moisture to the package and therefore make the chicken less delectably crispy. Other than their phenomenal chili chicken, I love most of the variety that they serve here; my favorites are their mapo tofu and twice-​cooked shredded pork.
My reservations against this restaurant is that the restaurant itself is small and dingy and their lack of ventilation coats your clothing in Eau de Chinese food no. 5. This place only accepts cash, so it is usually a visit to the ATM before I visit here. Also I noticed that the chefs alter the dish to the recipient’s presumed tastes and when I let my American friends order the food, it comes out less spicy and less tasty presumably to match their tastes.
Despite all that, this is my favorite place to eat lunch and dinner if I want Chinese. You can find me here with a couple of friends, couple of entrees, eating delicious Chinese food till we burst.

My favorite spot for Chinese. The taste/​quality of food is average, but you really can’t beat the value. One takeout box full of rice and another full of chicken for $ 8 – 11. Easily two meals for me, and I never leave anything on my plate.
Cash only business, but well worth a trip.

Yum! I really enjoyed my house special fried rice and Kung Pao shrimp. This is the place to go to when you just want to wear your jammies, watch a show, and eat that classic Chinese takeout. Very comforting. DON’T FORGET CASH!!! They don’t do cards so cash it is! Lastly, I need to comment that the woman working there was so full of smiles, generous, and relaxed. I’ll go back just because she was so fun.

The price was not as attractive after the first few visits but the food is decent, delicious with authentic Chinese milk-​tea!

Authentic Chinese food. The environment is lousy though. Good enough for Chinese Express.

This is the best Chinese food in Bloomington. I interned in New York, and couldn’t find anything similar in China Town. They’re chicken with mixed vegetables is unbelievable and always good.
Don’t let the hole in the wall look persuade you from missing one of the best tasting restaurants near iu campus.

Well it has some really tasty dishes like spicy tofu pork, whereas some are too oily or cheesy to handle. But it’s cheap, and always incredibly fast. Still a place for a quick lunch.

I got a lot of delicious food for $ 7. They only take cash, the place is on the run down side, but they serve some kickass Chinese food. Not the place to go for a date or a nice dinner, but definitely the place to go for delicious authentic Chinese.

Awesome chinese! Do not be deceived by the look outside. They have delicious chinese. They are authentic in town. You can get your own white rice. In asia, typically good restaurant does not have good appearance but they have delicious food

Best chinese food with reasonable price and the portion is huge. Definitely will come back! Cu today

This place is my second-​favorite Chinese restaurant in Bloomington! When I first tried it, I felt like I was whisked into a dirt cheap Chinese strip mall in the ghettos off of Santa Fe. I could almost hear the mutterings of families complaining about rising property prices, parents bragging about their son that went to Colombia, only to be one-​upped by the Mrs. Harvard-​law in the most casual humblebragging technique all obasans took years to cultivate.
Lucky Express is a quick, easy, no frills place to eat, and its cash only so be sure to have some on hand. My old roommate from Macao refuses to eat any of the other Chinese food in Bloomington after coming here. There really isn’t anything special, and it has one of the most generic Chinese menu I’ve seen, but when your target demographic is Chinese students studying abroad, that’s exactly what you need.
Being from the more Taiwanese and to a lesser extent, HK-​focused SoCal, it wasn’t exactly a taste of home, but the quality wasn’t too far off from those late night snacks up in Northern California.
Their chicken dishes are great here, and you really can’t go wrong with anyone of them. Cheap, good, and the atmosphere is probably the most authentic thing about Lucky Express.
Chicken: ²⁄₅
Cabbage: ⁰⁄₅
Beef: ¹⁄₅
Tofu: ¹⁄₅
Service: ¹⁄₅
Diversity: ³⁄₅
Price: $/​$$$$
Satisfaction:Price– ⁴⁄₅

This restaurant was my favorite restaurant before, but I think their recipes have changed over time, now most things I order are too spicy for me, but I still like the price and amount here, can’t be beaten by other Chinese restaurants

The few times I was there the food was pretty good.
I’ve not had every dish so I don’t know how they are at everything on the menu, but at least you you get to watch how they prepare your dish.
It’s a small family restaurant and I think they try hard to put out decent food.
It’s not going to wow anyone but in terms of «Bloomington Chinese» it’s one of the better places.
*******CASH ONLY*********

So far still one of my favorite Chinese food in town, miss this place a lot when I went back home.
Love their spicy chicken and beef bowl, every dishes comes large and cannot finish by one person.
They used to have milk tea, but right now they don’t have it anymore…

2^nd night in a row, order takes like 5 min, price is decent but food is fresh and not heavy!

Hygienic? Probably not. Tasty food? Yes (especially their eggplant and fish dishes).
Unfortunately, a tricky place to navigate if you’re a vegetarian since many of the veggie dishes contain pork and/​or other meat byproducts. The workers aren’t terrifically good at explaining what each dish has in it.
Most dishes are drenched in a rich brown sauce and cooked in large woks. It’s tasty, but very heavy. Since the woks are constantly in use, I can imagine most dishes have meat remnants in them, so again, vegetarians beware.
The restaurant itself is pretty bare-​bones and unpretentious. Sort of an old building in need of renovations.
If you’re NOT a vegetarian and looking for heavy, quasi-​authentic Chinese, check this place out. I’ve been here on a few occasions and would recommend it if you can accept their aforementioned flaws.

What a hidden gem! Tucked in the corner of an old shopping center is the best food in Bloomington and some of the best Chinese food in the US.
Lucky Express like so many other great restaurants only takes cash and appears a bit run down. The menu is on the wall and is in no way coherent. The dinning room is sparse. And the food is served on disposable plates. Forge through!
I had a hunch the food was going to be good when after I ordered, I watched a man fire up the wok and cook my meal. Nothing pre-​made hear. I had the beef in garlic sauce, spicy, sans the green peppers and the dumplings. The dumplings were the best I have had anywhere. The beef came with a huge plate of perfectly cooked rice. And to say the beef was beyond tasty would be an understatement.
If you happen to be passing through in B-​Town and can only eat at one place, this it. Excellent.

I can see why this is many people’s favorite Chinese restaurant in Bloomington even though it was still around a 3.5 star experience for me.
This restaurant is very small and when you walk in there, you see two large paper menus posted on the back of the wall – a yellow one in Chinese and English & a pink one just in Chinese. There was also a much smaller plastic menu available just in English which did not list all of the food options.
As a vegetarian, there was no vegetarian section for me, but there were several options on the menu that did not have meat. I ended up getting the Crispy Tofu which was about $ 8 and was large enough to feed two people. I was pretty happy with it, but was not blown away. It came with a large plate of white rice, and I was told by my friend that you could help yourself to even more white rice at the front if you wanted.
The service was very friendly (you order at the counter), but I did not like the fact that styrofoam was used for both the glasses and plates of rice, even though the main dishes were served on ceramic plates. The utensils were also all disposable as well – plastic cutlery or wooden chopsticks.
If someone wants to know what is the best Chinese restaurant in Bloomington, I will probably recommend this place, but it is still not a personal favorite. CASH ONLY & not date-​fancy.