The Food
This is egg noodles with some bite to it–served with sliced pork, wontons, bean sprouts, lettuce, in a rich, hot broth. I love this with soy sauce soaked jalapenos on the side. I feel so Asian dining at these kinds of restaurants.

You can get these noodles served with about 10 combinations including pork, chicken, duck, shrimp and wontons. Some places even have deep fried shrimp in the soup. At $5-$7 each, this is pocket change.

Lately I’ve been eating this with the broth on the side. My dad usually gets it this way and now I see why! The soup is sipped in between bites instead and this changes up the Mi experience. A very nice worker at Mi La Cay #4 suggested me to add about 2-3 tsp of spicy mustard (from the yellow squeeze bottle) and vinegar (yeah that bottle of red stuff isn’t soy sauce!) to the noodles, mix, and to be fearless.

If you are on a diet don’t even think about it. The meats are fatty and the broth is rich with oil too…

It’s almost making me forget about Japanese ramen.

Oh, soo good!

The Restaurants
But why are there three different Mi La Cays? And why do some of them have “China Chef” as part of the store name? I wish I could tell ya.

That nice worker I mentioned earlier turns out to be one of the family members and owners!. She let out that all of the owners of Mi La Cay are related and that this is a family run chain, but each place has their own recipe. Apparently it’s their game to talk smack and brag about how their own restaurant is better than the others.

Soup-wise I can barely tell the difference. But personally, my money’s on #4 (10078 Westminster Ave) because of the ever-so-friendly waitress and their smaller-cut jalapenos .

Mi La Cay
14092 Magnolia St #116
Westminster, CA 92683

China Chef Mi La Cay #4 (Uh, what happened to the others?)
10078 Westminster Ave
Garden Grove, CA 92843

China Chef Mi La Cay
8924 Bolsa Ave
Westminster, CA 92683

Food: A
Value: A
Service: A
Ambience: B

Fatty Duck – this was delicious!

Steamed Clams

Original post 9/11/09:

Guest writer from DBNewsWorld visits Seafood Noodle House!

When I think of Southern California I usually associate the area with Mexican neighborhoods sunny weather. With that, I was hoping to eat burritos while tanning on a beach, we decided to hit up some Chinese food. Enter Seafood Noodle House. The name, I will admit, sounds like ass and I guess it’s even sillier that we didn’t eat seafood or noodles.

In any case, we came into the roomy restaurant and were warmly greeted by two Chinese ladies on their lunch break. We were seated at table with nice pink tablecloths and napkins. The menu had its basic fare of Chinese food, sweet & sour this, Mongolian that, black bean sauce whatever you could imagine. We discussed briefly what we wanted to give us stomachaches and settled on Sweet & Sour Pork (surprise surprise), Roast Duck, Eggplant in Hot Garlic Sauce, and steamed rice.

While we waited for our food, the kind waitress brought us glasses of ice water, which made me really happy until I noticed black particles floating around in my water. At first I thought it was a bug, I kind of wish it was a bug because then at least I would know what I was looking at. But alas, the black particles were unidentifiable.

The food came out piping hot. The eggplant was rather unremarkable and super salty. There wasn’t the spicy sweetness I’ve grown accustomed to expect from the dish as I’ve had from other restaurants so I was pretty disappointed. It kind of looked nice. The pork dish was pleasant because you can’t really mess that up, which gave me something to please my palate with between eating that awful eggplant which we are pretty sure gave us intestinal problems later that evening. The duck wasn’t tough or chewy and was easy to eat as well, though I remember it being kind of bland.

We stuffed ourselves and had plenty left over to bring home. We were given fortune cookies at the end of the meal and one of the packages came with TWO fortune cookies. That was pretty sweet because that means we’re probably going to get a million dollars or something. Unfortunately the fortunes themselves kind of sucked overall.

I wasn’t disappointed with my experience here, but I’d rather eat a burrito on some hot beach with girls in bikinis running around any day.

Oriental Seafood Noodle House
14370 Culver Dr Suite H
Irvine, CA 92604
(914) 654-8388