Cassandra K.
Yelp
I was initially excited to see that the same Little Chef in OB opened a ghost kitchen closer to where I live. The cream cheese wontons at the original location are my favorite cream cheese wontons ever, so this seemed like a dream come true.
I have given the ghost kitchen multiple chances. I ordered the cream cheese wontons each time.
Closer to the grand opening of the ghost kitchen, the wontons were acceptably good. They never reached the same caliber as the OB location, but they stuck to the recipe pretty closely and I accepted it as a good alternative to making a special trip from the college area to OB.
The entrees, however, have never been good. The first entree I ordered was the egg foo young. I can't remember if I had ever ordered it before at the OB location, but my expectation was that I would receive 2-4 egg and bean sprout patties (either 2 larger ones or 4 smaller ones) with gravy and vegetables. I received two nearly-burnt patties the size of silver dollar pancakes drenched to hell in a thin, flavorless brown gravy with little veggies.
So I thought "Okay, the wontons are still good. Maybe I'll try something else on the menu?" So I tried the chicken chow mein. Also a mistake. I received a big pile of flavorless noodles with very sparse veggies and proteins. I had to find some soy sauce in my cabinet to make it even remotely taste like anything.
So then, I tried ordering only appetizers: cream cheese wontons, soup, steamed dumplings. Everything was decent, but nothing was great. The soup is okay. The portion is big and it's not overly salty. They give you crispy wonton skins with each soup order and the soup is heavily thickened with corn starch, but the veggies are slightly crisp and taste fresh. The steamed dumplings are fine, too, but they taste like grocery store frozen aisle dumplings, so it really made me feel like I was overpaying. The whole time, the cream cheese wontons steadily declined in quality.
This last time I ordered was the last straw. I've been too sick to cook, so I doubled up on ordering some soup and placed the appetizer order that I previously described.
The soup was fine, but everything else sucked. The dumplings' skins were mostly broken as though they had been mishandled and the top of the dumpling sauce wasn't snapped on all the way, so the whole package was a soggy, leaky mess. The cream cheese wontons were also soggy and no longer contained the usual scallion and water chestnut cream cheese mixture. The crispy wonton skins were stale and chewy as though they had been fried up several days ago. The best part about my order were the bottles of green tea, but those shouldn't count.
While the name might be the same as the OB establishment, this ghost kitchen really needs to make some big changes and get their sht together. At this point, it's useless comparing them to literally any other Chinese takeout place in the area let alone the OB location.
