Empire Chinese Restaurant - Bloomfield, NJ

We received another Chinese take out menu under our door a few weekends ago (we get tons of take out menus under our door) but this particular menu caught our attention. It's for Empire Chinese Restaurant, which is located in Bloomfield, the neighborhood next to us.

What caught our attention was the coupons on the menu. Usually, it would be for a free can of soda or free wonton soup and eggrolls. This restaurant was a little bit different. We could get either a pint of Chicken with Broccoli or Honey Spare Ribs Tips for purchases over $25! That's not too bad at all....there are even more yummy free stuff for purchases over $35 and $55. Also, they have free delivery for orders over $10! Most places in our area would charge $1 -$2 for delivery. So, we decided to give this place a try.

We called to order our food ( unlike some other places, they could speak English well enough to understand our order the first time :P) and it arrived in about 25 minutes. Not too bad at all. Here is all the stuff that we ordered (ok, for those of you wondering, no, all that food is not for ONE meal...we ordered enough for three meals).

We ordered the fried scallops (8 pieces for $2.95) as our appetizer. The two eggrolls in the picture is part of the special combination plates that we ordered.

We ordered two different special combination plates. A combination plate comes with your choice of main dish, roast pork or chicken fried rice and an egg roll. This is our oder of Sweet Sour Chicken with Roast Pork Fried Rice ($6.65). The deep fried chicken in batter wasn't oily, in fact, it was light and fluffy. Very nice.

We also ordered the General Tso's Shrimp with Chicken Fried Rice ($6.65). I was pretty amazed that this dish was part of the combination plate choices. Usually, General Tso's Shrimp would be found under the 'House Specialities' section (meaning that it will be more expensive) in most other restaurants.

I've always heard about this dish called Moo Shu but I have never really gotten around to trying it. So, we decided to order one portion of that, just for education :P I ordered the Moo Shu Beef ($7.95) and it comes with 5 pancakes (really thin rice flour pancakes, something like the Malaysian popiah skin) and a tub of Peking duck sauce. You are supposed to spread the sauce on the pancake, place some of the stir fried beef and vege on it and roll it up. After taking a bite of the roll, I am hooked! The Moo Shu has now become one of my favorite Chinese take out dishes :P It's good!

This is the Honey Spare Rib Tips (with white rice enough for at least 2 people) that we got free because our order was above $25. It's not some sad small portion of rib tips but it was a large full portion! It tasted great, sticky and sweet, just now I like it!

Look, they even threw in 4 fortune cookies for free. These days, most Chinese delivery places would not give you free fortune cookies anymore. They would charge 25 cents a piece. So, that was a nice thing to receive. Our total bill to $25.90 (thanks to my kiasu calculations before I ordered, wanted to make sure we hit $25 but not too much over :P). $25.90 for so much food, I think it's really really worth it. We would definitely order from this place again!

Empire Chinese Restaurant
12 Arlington Avenue,
Bloomfield, NJ 07003
Tel: (973) 566-9996
Fax: (973) 566-6658