Golden City - S San Diego

The service was great, the food is even better! Best Chinese food I’ve had in a long time! The orange chicken was delicious the walnut shrimp was one of the best I’ve ever eaten. The star of the table was the Beef with Ginger Onion! Holly smokes that was the most delicious beef I’ve had ever! Truly a hidden treasure!

I've eaten in almost a dozen Chinese restaurants in Kearny Mesa. This one is my favorite.

I work next door to this plaza where Golden city is so I order here about once a week. The food is always good and nice portion and bonus they already know what I want.

Golden City Restaurant is located in a strip mall and shares the parking lot with other businesses. No problems finding parking here. Interior deco is outdated. People come here for the authentic casual Chinese dining experiences and definitely not for upscale ambiance. We got to the restaurant around 8:40pm after got rejected by two Vietnamese restaurants because they were closing at 9pm. Half of the restaurant was occupied by a large group celebrating the Chinese Moon Festival. We managed to wave down a waitress with our fingers crossed that they would serve us. We got lucky and we were seated but she warned us that we needed to order immediately as kitchen is about to close. Three minutes after we sat down, waitress came back with hot tea and asked us to order. We hadn’t even look at the menu thoroughly at the point. So, under some pressure, we ordered some typical Cantonese dishes we had at other Chinese restaurants and then we also asked the waitress to suggest couple dishes. Dishes came out fast and we ate fast because we were extremely hungry and also we knew that the restaurant was closing soon. We were grateful that they served us a delicious meal. All of us really liked the crab meat with fish maw soup (even the picky eater). We also ordered honey walnut shrimp, garlic stir fried veggie, cubed beef with green peppers and jalapeño, beef chow fun dry style and salted fish with chicken fried rice. All dishes were very good and authentic. We didn’t get a chance to take pictures of some of the dishes we really liked because we had to eat fast: tasty soup and fried rice but they were very good and fried rice portion was big and we had a boxful of leftover fried rice to take home. Because it was closing time, they didn’t give us the free sweetened bean soup dessert which was usually given to customers after dinner. Free hot tea was served with meal. As we were leaving, we thanked the waitress for letting us in. She was gracious and said we were welcome and invited us back. Nice staff! 10/2023 update. We went back to the restaurant as most places were busy on Friday nights. Once again, we were able to get seated for a large group within 5 minutes. We order Peking duck, roasted duck, beef chow fun noodle, egg drop soup, string beans, fried rice and spicy fried chicken wings. All dishes were delicious especially the roasted duck which was juicy, super tender and served warm. Waitstaff gave us free red bean soup for dessert. We will be back to try other dishes for sure.

It's alright. We liked the beef tenderloin with black bean sauce, but the chow fun noodles were not cooked together properly. They were broken, stuck together, etc. It was not a proper chow fun.