Big Lantern

The food is ok but do not order delivery from this place. The drivers call and ask you to come down and they don’t want to deliver to apartments.

This place is absolutely terrible. It took over 2 hours for our order the come, when we tried to cancel and get our money refunded the manger hung up. Never order from here, you won’t get any food. or your money back. I wish zero stars was an option. This place is garbage.

Expensive. For dim sum, this place is much above the average price. The food was pretty good, but I just could not justify what I paid.
We got chinese broccoli, ha gow, shrimp rice rolls, steamed pork buns and siu mai. We ended up paying almost $ 25 each with tip… wow.
Service was very slow. I believe everything is made to order, so we received some of our food almost 30 minutes after everything else and had to take it to go. The wait staff isn’t anything spectacular either.
I noticed people mainly get delivery here, but if I lived in the area, I’d only order to go from Big Lantern if I had desperate cravings for dim sum. I’m sure in San Francisco, with the infamous Chinatown, there are better quality and better priced dim sum restaurants close by.

Good salt and pepper wings but mediocre szhechuan chicken. Definitely worth a try again for other dishes. My second time ordering for delivery they took over 2 hours, so I cancelled the order and asked Grubhub for a refund. The restaurant didn’t even apologize. Just «oh ok».

Decided to eat here after a night at the bars. Didn’t read any reviews beforehand but after the experience we had I was definitely surprised to see all the negatives! We got the meatless kung pao chicken, the meatless five spice chicken, and orange tofu. It was all amazing, especially the five spice. Apparently dining in is the way to go here.

In the Mission standard Chinese takeout is rare. There is plenty of Thai, Burmese, Japanese, etc. but Chinese is a bit lacking. Big Lantern is a solid Chinese takeout option. You can eat in the restaurant, order on Eat24, or grab takeout from the restaurant yourself.
Food — they have a standard menu with all of the usual Chinese takeout options. I’ve had a the Kung Pao Chicken, Combo Fried Rice, Chicken Chow Mien, Mu Shu Pork, and Broccoli Beef. All of the dishes have been very delicious and well cooked.
Atmosphere — nothing special at all, typical casual Chinese style restaurant. I have never eaten there, I usually prefer to grab takeout.
Good solid option for Chinese takeout. They have pretty good dim sum too if that’s what your craving.

Rude on the phone, always expect you to pay with cash. Then, when they mess up an order you can expect to wait an hour and after 4 calls. it comes ice cold and tasting horrible. With the number of chinese restaurants in this town. you can skip this one and miss out on nothing.

I’ve had delivery from here and eaten in. It’s a great Chinese food option in the neighborhood. For some reason there is limited Chinese restaurants in the Mission. I’m a vegetarian, so I love all of the veg and meatless-​meat options on the menu, specifically the vegetarian wonton soup, which can be difficult to find. I haven’t had a chance to try all the dim sum options, but look forward to going back to do so.
On a rainy Sunday night, there were only a couple other parties eating in, but you could tell they were getting a lot of delivery calls. Solid food and good price.

Sadly I never got to try the food. I placed an order and waited almost 2 hours before canceling. Order was placed on a Sunday at 2pm. I called to see if the order was received and they said yes, and it was on it’s way. 30 minutes later, still nothing. I would not suggest ordering for delivery unless you have an insane amount of time to wait.

An extremely extensive menu for all greasy Chinese dim sum and entrees cravings, open till midnight. The vegetarian/​vegan plates dim sum are pretty decent and cheap!
Highly recommend the taro vegetable puff. Uniquely crispy/​deep fried on the outside, creamy goodness on the inside.
Service is pretty good, despite it being a Chinese/​dim sum place!

There is seriously nothing to hate and everything to love about Big Lantern.
Location? Prime. On 16^th right by two of my favorite bars — Kilowatt and Gestalt Haus. The next time you’re hungover, maybe fill yourself up with chow mein before drinking some really good craft beer.
You can sit outside at one of their sidewalk tables, take in the sun, and do some of the best people watching in the Mission. A bum seriously started puking almost right in front of our table, yet somehow that didn’t make a bad experience for me. City living, right?
The staff here are very friendly and the menu is HUGE with lots of vegan options for your lame-​ass friends. They offer some pretty damn good Chinese food for pretty damn cheap too. $ 18 for my friend and I. Can’t beat this.

I like coming here with non-​vegetarian friends because there are solid omnivore AND vegetarian options from every part of the menu. The meatless chicken fried rice, in particular, is tasty and fairly inexpensive — the portion is big enough for two meals. My omnivore bf loves the great value of the dim sum sampler too.
I was excited to try their vegetarian dim sum as well, but the options are a bit uneven. While the traditionally veggie-​centric kinds are great (fried radish cake, etc), sadly, the meatless chicken buns can’t hold a candle to real char siu bao, which I still miss from my omnivore past. Still, it’s not the fault of Big Lantern that AFAIK there doesn’t seem to be any vegetarian approximation of char siu pork yet, so I don’t hold it against them, and I’m just glad someone is even attempting to make vegetarian dim sum at all. :)
The lunch specials are a good value and always come with soup, which is great on chilly SF summer days. :P
Although you can’t tell from the outside, the interior here is actually pretty nice, with Chinese art and high ceilings. It’s rarely totally full, so it’s easy to get seated. They do a thriving takeout and delivery business, and they’re very thorough about including utensils, condiments, and even fortune cookies in every takeout order.

Solid Chinese food in the Mission. Really close to one of our favorite bars, and it can be a nice break when we don’t actually feel like Mexican food. Which is rare LOL.
Loved their dim sum. Typical Chinese dishes are great.
Service is always fast and friendly.
It has been a whole since we had some dim sum. We need to go back soon.

So I was on Unilocal for like and hour trying find a place to deliver. It was close to closing for most places so alot were pickup only. So I finally narrowed it down to this one and another indian restaurant and I chose this one. I placed my order online, here through Unilocal… which is the app eat 24. The estimated time for delivery was 10:30 and the guy showed up around 11:10. Also once the guy came to my address he had a hard time finding what room to deliver my food to he had to call me a couple of times before he got the food to me. Around 11 I called the reastaurant to find out if the food was still coming to me and the waiter on the phone said yes the driver just left with your food.
So I tried the soup first. I really didn’t like the flavor too much it had almost a sour fishy flavor to it and when I eat hot and sour soup I like it more on the tangy side, but I finished the whole cup, cauze it wasn’t that bad, plus I was hungry (I really hadn’t eaten anything all day).
Onto the Dim sum plater: first i had the (shrimp rolls) very good, although at this pooint I realized that I forgot to order vinegar and hot and sour sauce. the «shrimp dim sum» was very fresh tasting and they replaced the «shrimp» with some sort of tofu? it tasted fine.
The next one was the mushu“pork filled” this they filled with big white sticky? rice and lots of tofu, i didn’t really like this one too much, but I don’t really like the original one anywayz.
Last onto the «pork bun» This was pretty good. Next I tried the Fresh Mango Pudding and this was my favorite of all the items… even though I couldn’t finish it because I was still so full from eating just so little food (hence having not eaten all day)
The Dim sum is still there as well as the peach buns, (I probably will eat in the morning… since that is usually when you eat dim sum anywayz). I would order from here again, but probably just cause it is hard to find vegetarian alternatives to authentic chinese food. Next time I will try to order one of their main dishes, like there tofu sandwhich, «tuna» sandwhich, or one of their main rice dishes. And of course I would order the mango pudding again.

I’m sorry but this place is not good. I was super excited to try a place that had a large selection of vegetarian dim sum, but I’ve definitely had better. Came here on a Saturday night and this place was basically empty. Even though it was empty, the table that we sat at was very dirty — had they not had enough time to at least clean the tops of the empty tables?
Whatever, we got over that and went into ordering food. We basically ordered every veggie dim sum option on the menu. I wish I could’ve even liked one of them, but unfortunately all of them were super greasy or tasteless or cold. It’s not like this place is even that cheap; there’s way definitely better places for dim sum in the city.

If I could give no stars, I would, but that’s not an option here.
I ordered through the Eat24 app, order was confirmed and estimated delivery time was an hour. An hour later and still no order, contacted the restaurant, they said it was on the way.
An hour and a half later, still no order, called the restaurant and they said that it’s NOW just on its way, which meant it would have taken 2 hours for the food at this point, and that’s just ridiculous. Whoever it was who picked up my call was very unapologetic and with an attitude as if my order inconvenienced them. Don’t worry Big Lantern, don’t think I’ll be causing you any more trouble by giving you any business in the future. And by the looks of it, this isn’t the first instance. Get your act together.
Poor customer service! She told me to contact Eat24 to receive a refund, kept insisting to wait for my food. How long do you want to keep your customers waiting? Eat24 was more than accommodating, even offered to have the meal paid for on them. Learn a thing or two about efficiency, customer service and who knows… Maybe this would be the last review of this type.
This review could have been different had I actually received my order, it could have tasted great but no one wants to wait 2 hours for cold Chinese food.
I highly recommend that no one order from Big Lantern, ever.

Did not order delivery like most other Unilocalers, but ate in the actual restaurant. On a Saturday afternoon, the place was mostly empty (rather large restaurant) but heavily staffed. I came here craving dim sum and ended up ordering some shrimp dumplings, sesame balls, and their lunch special Mongolian beef. Everything was just okay. To be clear, this place is very Americanized Chinese food, so if you’re looking for highly authentic experience and flavors, this is not the place for you. The shrimp dumpling’s skin was oddly gelatin-​like and sticky, but the filling was decently flavored. The sesame balls tasted great, but the fried outside portion was not crisp enough for me to poke even a chopstick into it without using a lot of force. The Mongolian beef tasted fine but felt heavily Americanized with extraneous sweet brown sauce. It lacked punch /​spiciness and was more sweet than savoury.
Everything was just okay but I will say that the employees working here seem very sweet and attentive. I overheard one lady saying in Chinese to a delivery boy as he went out the door that he forgot the vinegar for a customer’s order of dumplings and that she didn’t want the customer to have to eat the dumplings without it. So he went back in and the lady employee put the vinegar into the delivery bag. I thought that was a nice gesture.
All in all, if you do decide to come here, I would set my expectations. Red Lantern caters to a certain audience and unfortunately it’s not so much for me.

Whenever we order delivery from this place, there’s something wrong – the food is very greasy, bland, soggy, or something else is wrong. I highly suggest dining here, in person, if you can. We recently dined here in person for the second time.
Pork potstickers = perfectly cooked.
Chicken with snow peas = delicious. Sliced chicken, crunchy snow peas and water chestnuts in a great brown sauce.
Garlic noodles = good. Soft noodles with plenty of garlic. (I prefer more al dente noodles but everyone else loved this dish.)
Orange Chicken = hot, crispy battered chicken with a spicy, sticky orange sauce, on a bed of steamed broccoli.
Broccoli beef = classic. Tender broccoli, carrots, and sliced beef in a very flavorful sauce.
Service = friendly.
Again, I repeat, dine here in person, and you will have a better experience than with their delivery service. We’ve tried their delivery service 5 times and given up. Need to find a different place for delivery.

I’ve been coming here on and off for about a decade, so yeah I’m a fan. It’s a great place to grab appetizers in the Mission when you’re hitting one of the dive bars, or to go sit down with your gal for dinner. Kat and I recently visited and it was just what the doctor ordered! I’m a fan of the ‘paper wrapped chicken’, ‘pot stickers’, the ‘crab puffs’, and the ‘mongolian beef’. We also enjoyed the ‘pork buns’. Prices are reasonable. Parking can be tough in the neighborhood, just a warning not their fault…
I will happily be back for more!

Evenings like tonight are ones that make you happy to be alive, especially in San Francisco.
The longer I live in the Bay Area, the more amazing people I get to meet. My travels through the vegan food circuit have lead me to so many funny, interesting and genuinely kind-​hearted souls, and I am very grateful for that.
My friend Rosanne P. made a reservation for a baker’s dozen, but only 11 were able to attend. The menu is slightly overwhelming, especially for newcomers. I had only been to Big Lantern two or three times, and it had been ages since my last visit, so I was ready and willing to return.
We ordered family style so we could get a taste of everything. We selected quite a vast array of Chinese delicacies, veganized:
*Steamed Wontons with Chili Oil
*Onion Pancake
*BBQ Meatless Chicken Bun
*Spinach Dumpling with Meatless Chicken
*Chow Fun with Meatless Chicken
*Sauteed String Bean With Fried Tofu
*Garlic Eggplant
*Sesame Meatless Chicken
*General’s Meatless Balls
*Sesame Balls
My favorites were the Sesame «chicken» and the green beans and tofu. Everything was delicious except maybe the General’s Meatless Balls (I’m not even sure of the real name, but they were ball-​shaped and kind of strange-​tasting). The eggplant was a little undercooked, but otherwise, the cooks did a fabulous job of keeping up with our gigantic order. The pacing was perfect. We never felt rushed nor did we feel like we were waiting a long time for anything.
Water glasses were promptly replenished, which was very much appreciated, as most of their dishes leaned towards the spicy side. I love that! My friend Roshi and I kept adding more chili to everything. I am a heat freak. The hotter, the better. I did choke slightly on my first bite of the wonton with chili oil, as I was not expecting for it to have such a ferocious kick. Definitely worth ordering!
We all feasted until our bellies were bulging and our belts were waving a white flag… it was an incredible meal shared with ten lovelies, and I’m so very glad that we chose Big Lantern for our friend Clyde’s one-​day-​too-​late birthday bash.
I will definitely be returning for some take-​out. Sorry to anyone I have to ride next to on BART, as I’m sure my tofu and veggies will be stinking up the train. If I offend your olfactory senses, I would be more than happy to share my dinner with you.