T C Garden Restaurant

If you are on Northside of campus and you need a place to get a quick lunch between classes, T C garden is a viable option.Chances are, you'll probably notice a lot of chinese speaking people around which may or may not be indicative of this place's quality? Who knows, perhaps?It does help to know how to speak chinese, because it makes communication more practical and easy. But do not let that be a deterrent!The menu is a bit hard to read, but there are plenty or photos plastered to help guide customers. You can simply say "this one or that one!" I got the Hainan Garlic chicken, which was honestly meh quality (feel free to take a look at the photos)BUT MAN... as a college student the end all be all metric should be portion sizes, and my goodness they are generous. Forget complaining about quality, ambience, language barrier, ordering. They will give you a hefty homie scoop.If I could give this place a 3.5 stars I would, but I round up :) do give this place a try

** The following review reflects my delivery experience DURING the COVID-19 pandemic. **School daze, school daze. Even though we had our food delivered during the pandemic, I remember vividly the little food court on Hearst near Euclid from which our food came. That's because I came here all the time as a freshly scrubbed Cal undergrad. Why? It was a lot of bang for the buck, and my cafe of choice was Aki and their donburi bowls and tempura plates.Aki is apparently still there and so is this Chinese spot. What's more, they offer steamed chicken for a bargain price, wonder of wonders. I ordered the $8.95 Ginger and Green Onion which came with a lot of white rice and a deep-fried egg roll (photo: https://bit.ly/2L0DA2F). It was really hearty and frankly delicious, and I managed to show enough willpower to avoid most of the rice.The egg roll not so much. Jamie went for the $8.95 Kung Pao Chicken which was similarly abundant in portion with the same extras (photo: https://bit.ly/2WNoJeO). He deemed it filling and just spicy enough with plenty of stir-fried poultry. We received a bonus item, a Soy Sauce Hard Boiled Egg which was a nice touch even though I always feel weird eating eggs with chicken (photo: https://bit.ly/3rvJrhl). The meal took me back to my campus days.FOOD - 4 stars...hearty portions for cheap, and it's goodAMBIANCE - n/a...it was a delivery but I recall that food court very wellSERVICE - 4 stars...it came quickTOTAL - 4 stars...makes me feel young...Go Bears!RELATED - Exploring Berkeley? Here's a collection of places I've tried and reviewed: https://bit.ly/2CbVh8u

Were very helpful in helping navigate the menu. They're happy to help!! Very accommodating, although they cleared space for me to eat inside, I chose to eat outside where they delivered my food to me! The meal came with a delicious bowl of hot soup. The fried pork chops were so crispy and savory in the first bite, as they were freshly made. The sauce dowsed the rice which made the dish all the better. The side of vegetables provided a nice change in texture. I'm used to finishing my food, but i literally couldn't eat it all in one sitting. They give you so much!!! And I was bewildered when I read the receipt. I haven't had a whole meal + drink cost so little in ages, definitely not in Berkeley.

A few years after my first review, TC Garden has definitely grown on me, much like the prices of food around campus have also grown. Where it might cost you $10+ after tax for a full meal with decent sized portions elsewhere around campus (I'm talking a full meal, not "cup of soup and a salad"), at TC Garden you can get a decently sized entree with a bowl of soup and a heaping pile of rice for around $8.50, and that's after tax! The quality and quantity of the food hasn't really changed since my last review- it's still not that amazing, but it's hot, cheap, quick, and you get a lot of it. But now it's an even better deal than it used to be. An oasis of cheap food in a desert of $12 sandwiches.

I got the eggplant and fish rice dish. Honestly, this place is cheap compared to other stores in Berkeley. The rice was a nice big heaping - my favorite. But... I gotta say that it was sour, maybe because it was made with vinegar. It was good enough to satisfy my Chinese food cravings though.SUSTAINABILITY CORNER: I was really sad when my dish came out in a plastic plate. Initially, I saw a customer with a reusable bowl so I thought I would get one....but no. Luckily I brought my own chopsticks. They also had free self-serve soup on the side, which the owner kindly pointed out. However, the only thing to put it in was a plastic cup. I ended up putting the chopsticks back. Next time I come back, I'll try to bring my own Tupperware and see if I can get my meal in it instead.

This place used to serve quite tasty food at very fair prices. I went here all through my several years as a student at Cal. My most recent visits here have been terrible though. The beef in the broccoli beef tastes rancid, or at least cooked in a skillet whose oil hasn't been changed in a very long time. The lo mein noodles are mushy and greasy, like spaghetti that's been overcooked. The orange chicken turned out to consist of nuking battered chicken chunks that had been sitting out all morning and drizzling orange sauce over them. And the price for a 2-item combo - $15 - isn't competitive given this low food quality. Save yourself the disappointment and visit one of the many other restaurants in this food court instead.

T C Garden has switched management. I gotta drop some stars :(What stayed the same:- Prices. Still as low as always.- A lot of the menu.- Complimentary soup. Yum.What changed:- My duck was slightly cold. Food at old T C Garden was usually steamy.- General quality of duck was worse. Less meat. Extremely salty. Kinda tough. Overly saucy (maybe to hide the bad quality). Just look at the pictures, man. What a tragedy.- Portion sizes are a little smaller, depending on what you get.- Paper plates.- At the old T C Garden, I think usually they would remember where you were and bring the food to you. If they forgot, you had a number, so it was all chill. At the new T C Garden, they just yell out the name of the dish, and you're supposed to yell back. In Chinese. I think it's assumed that if you look Chinese, you speak fluent Chinese, even if you very clearly order in English. My Chinese is atrocious, and to make things worse, I'm not very assertive. Someone else who ordered the same dish as me got food first even though they ordered after me. I witnessed this happening to other people too.

I was a regular here for about 3 years. I worked on Northside and had a lot of classes on Northside as well so I always stopped by for some good, cheap Chinese food. If you're craving Chinese food, this is the place to go on Northside. Better than Quickly's and the other Asian places in this plaza. Prices went up by a 25 cents or so every so often, so be prepared to see some differences in charges after a period of time.I frequented the BBQ Pork Chow Mein. Very oily but very yummy. I find TC Garden's BBQ Pork Chow Mein a lot better than King Dong's on Shattuck, and it is cheaper too. It is a huge portion. If you dine in you get the soup of the day with your order. All the soups are pretty yummy. I like all of them except for the sweet & sour soup, but it is more of a personal distaste rather than TC Garden's fault. They usually have egg flower soup which is perfect on a cold day. The food is very cheap, and they accept credit card as well. Food comes out really quick.You can sit inside or outside. During lunch hours it gets very crammed inside but you can sit at the picnic tables outside in the plaza. You get a number after you order and a waitress will bring your food to you, wherever you are sitting! You can also phone in a to-go order.

I. LOVE. THIS. RESTAURANT. TC GARDEN. YOU. DA. BEST!!!!During my first 4 years studying and living in Berkeley, I never thought of coming here, being that it seemed like a lousy cheap li'l Chinese restaurant. I ended up trying it out during my final summer semester at Cal. In the end, I don't think my assumptions of the place were too far off. The quality of food isn't that great at all. The food is stinkin' cheap. The food has somewhat of an air of authenticity to it. But somehow, all things considered, I ended up loving this place to bits.I find TC Garden to be severely underrated, but that may be strongly biased by personal preference in both taste and atmosphere. I sometimes find myself very much craving the food here, especially the eggplant and fish w/ rice. It comes drenched in a sticky spicy and sweetish sour sauce that goes very well with the rice. It's the type of sauce that would go extremely well on fried chicken wings. If you like eggplant and fish, this is the dish to get. It was good enough to be a weekly go to for me over summer.Two other dishes I'd like to note are the roast duck noodle soup and the minced pork w/ preserved veggies vermicelli soup thing. The roast duck is legit to the bone alongside the cabbage and very soft noodles. The minced pork noodle soup is sort of a strange case where I think it's absolutely amazing, but would for the most part, would not recommend to most others. The proponents of the dish as a whole don't make too much sense to me, but it blends together so well. The pickled veggies add not only an acidic taste, but also a crunchy texture with the pork being moist and the noodles having a thin slurpy funness to it.The atmosphere has a nice sort of "Chinese comfort/Asian food court" feel to it. One could either sit outside at the shared food court table amongst the many restaurants there or sit inside where there are cheap plastic chairs and small tables. They start you off with your water and complimentary egg flower soup, and by the time you're done with that, your food is already ready for you.In the end, TC Garden isn't a place I would take visiting friends and family to. If you're the type who tends to really enjoy high quality ingredients fresh from the source cooked by a chef with a passion for good eats who outputs a dish that exhibits hard skill and effort even before having tried the food itself (and you don't enjoy fast food), the you'll probably detest this place. What it produces very well is individually portioned Chinese comfort food. It's definitely a great place to grab a lunch, dinner, or some other awkwardly timed college meal when taking classes or working on a big project in the area. It also has the plus of being extremely affordable for the typical college students' budget.

TC garden used to have portions so big that I wasn't sure if I could finish. Now, a $13 lunch option left me about half full. The beef was also dry, although the flavor itself was alright. It earns 1 more star for its prior good service, but as of writing this review, I cannot recommend this place when its neighbors offer much better portions.