I eat at No. 1 Chinese Restaurant more often than anywhere else in town. If their primary offerings were not Americanized Chinese fast food I might go five stars, but it's still the best Chinese food in town. I noticed some poor reviews by people who got the lunch special. Well, one of the rules when you go to a restaurant is, never get the lunch special. More than likely it's food the restaurant really needs to sell. So yes, the lunch special rice isn't so good. I really had no complaint about the quality of the other components in the lunch dishes but I'm sure it varies. Now every time I go there I get a huge platter of food and I eat all of it. Today I got a huge platter of food (a large meal plus egg roll) and two extra veggie rolls, from their Special Combination Platter menu. No problem. Plate was clean when I finished.
For the price of a large burger and fries and a soda at other fast food joints in Greencastle, No. 1 Chinese Restaurant gives you a soda and a good meal full of fresh vegetables, good rice, good sauce and a cookie at the end. It's hard to produce a meal for that price if you use farm fresh ingredients, and I know that many of the vegetables are factory cut and bagged but so far I've not seen too many that are canned or frozen. I would guess the peas and carrot chunks in the fried rice are canned or frozen, but this place is run on a budget. Shrimp has to be the frozen type, it's all you get around here, and probably meats and things like vegetable and egg rolls are bought as a frozen product. I will defend these people because they are professional and run a good shop with fast service and dependable quality. If the guy at the counter says ten minutes, it often comes out in five. I see lots of Asian people come in there for lunch. With the vast array of offerings on the menu, I can't as yet speak for all the meals, but I want to try the House Special dishes to see if they work a little harder on those. People often tend to buy the same sort of thing a lot, at restaurants like this, and get bored. Diversity rises with price, I will hope. If not I will go back to the cheaper meals.
I know these are restaurant people because when we happened upon them by accident this summer I asked the guy at the front counter how long they had been there, and he said, Since 5 this morning. It was one p.m. then. If you work those long hours and are just breaking for lunch for five minutes, to eat a fast bowl of rice and go back to work, it's a restaurant. Open seven days a week and on Christmas. I think he said they'd been open eleven years when he did understand my question. If you're up at five you are tired by one, it takes a minute to answer questions.
The good soy sauce is on the tables in the Kikkoman bottles, the stuff in the packets is the corn syrup type but still ok. read more