Tasty Noodle House is an Asian Chinese cuisine restaurant located in Culver Plaza in Irvine. It is not a very big restaurant and can probably accommodate up to around 50 people at once. The tables are very crowded together. We got there on a Friday night around 6:30 and there was a line to get a table. We put our name down on the sign up sheet and waited for about 5 minutes before we got a table.
It was unfortunate that we were sitting by the entrance. The entrance of the restaurant has a wall of glass window and glass door. Since the restaurant is facing west, the sun light shone through the glass and was very glaring. So if possible, it would be the best to get a table towards the inside of the restaurant.
Although the restaurant has the word "Noodle" in its name, it does also offer a variety of other rice dishes. We ordered a pork sauce dry noodle dish, a beef rice, and a Xiao Long Bao. The Xiao Long Bao dumpling was quite disappointing. There wasn't enough juice trapped inside the dumpling. The dumpling skin was quite thick as well. Overall, the dumpling tasted like it was from a frozen freezer, and not a hand made dumpling.
The good thing is that the pork sauce dry noodle bowl was quite decent. It came with a lot of sauce, along with some cucumbers. The noodle was well boiled to maintain its tenderness. The best dish we had today was actually the beef rice. The beef was quite juicy and tender. There were also some daikon mixed in the rice and was very well cooked to have a soft texture to it.
Overall, this restaurant is half decent and we would definitely come back again. However, I would not recommend any steamed dishes such as dumplings.
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