Good luck finding many places open for dinner mid-week in Te Anau in the middle of winter -- there's really only a handful. Luckily, Ming Garden came to our rescue.
As one of two Chinese restaurants in town, Ming Garden gets a lot of Chinese tour bus visitors, so you'll probably see quite a few large groups seated at the big tables with lazy susans full of share plates. We arrived as one such group was leaving, which was lucky because service was slow enough as it was -- I can't imagine how much slower it would've been if we had arrived while the large group was still there.
Food was good but nothing impressive. Not many vegetarian options on the menu -- you really had to hunt for them. I had the Spicy Potato dish, one of the few vegetarian dishes. The waitress went and checked with the chef to make sure it didn't have any egg, dairy or honey in it either. When our food came out, I saw that my dish basically consisted of these long, julienned strips of potato that were soaked in some sort of spicy sauce along with veggies. It was pretty oily and probably not the healthiest of options, but it was definitely tasty.
My dad had the ginger beef, which he said was WAYYYYY too ginger-y (ask them to cut back the ginger a bit, even if you love ginger) and my mom had the sweet-and-sour pork, which she enjoyed.
Ambience was meh. The decor is pretty typical of an aging Chinese restaurant: too-bright lights, dated tablecloths, terrible acoustics, glaring light-coloured walls with cheesy Chinese paintings. However, Ming Garden appears to be the superior Chinese restaurant in town -- if you have a look at the other one (which is just around the corner, if you take the ironically-named Wong Way), you'll see that Ming Garden is the less dingy-looking of the two by far.
Service was also meh -- there were only two girls (a Chinese-speaking girl and a kiwi girl) serving the entire restaurant, so everything was very slowwwwwww. But both of them were nice enough, and helpful.
Price-wise, it did seem kind of expensive, but from our two experiences dining out in Te Anau, I think EVERYTHING here is expensive. It's a tourist town, after all.
Given how tiny a place Te Anau is, and how few options you have in terms of dining at night in the off-season, this is one of the better options for sure. If you have a craving for Chinese while you're in Te Anau, or there's not much else open that takes your fancy, I'd say definitely give Ming Garden a try. read more