Delicious Food Corner lives up to its name!
For much of my life, takeout dining meant food from the local Chinese-American eatery, the land of one from Column A and two from Column B. Or at least, that’s how it was back in the Bronx. But I’m not in the Bronx anymore. And that means, Chinese takeout from the great restaurants of the San Gabriel Valley — especially from a four-restaurant chain called Delicious Food Corner. It’s truly an eatery where they’ve got everything you want. As long as it’s not chop suey.
When it’s open for sit-down dining, that menu is spiral bound with a multitude of color photographs, so daunting you wonder if you’ll ever actually figure out what to eat. It’s 26 pages long — with advertising on 10 of the pages for local businesses like the Magic Mirror Beauty Center, the Wang Intellectual Property Law Corporation, and TopKids Preschool and Kindergarten. (There are more ads on the placemat as well. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a Realtor’s logo on the chopsticks!) But once you’ve negotiated your way through the 16 pages that aren’t ads, what you find is a remarkable assortment of Chinese comfort foods. Delicious Food Corner really lives up to its name.
It’s a chain with branches in San Gabriel, Rosemead, Monterey Park and Hacienda Heights, with a loyal following who are probably salivating at the thought of once again packing each of them for breakfast, lunch and dinner, eating what I like to describe as “Hong Kong coffee shop” cuisine.
delicious food corner
And when the chain is open again, you can show up for breakfast, and you’ll be confronted with a world of dishes so far from, say, IHOP, that you may feel as if you’ve tumbled into an alternate universe. Which, of course, you have. There are 16 types of congee — not one of which is flavored with berries or brown sugar. Rather, the toppings are all savory — pork and preserved egg, minced beef, chicken and abalone — and sundry pork parts. On the side, you can get notably not-sweet Chinese doughnuts. But if it’s sugar you crave, there’s also toast with butter and jam — found on the same breakfast menu section as curry fried fish balls and Macau style pork chop burgers.
Show up later in the day, and the combos are gone. But the congee and the toast (and fishballs) remain. Joined by a madcap world of soups — with and without noodles, fried noodles, fried rice, clay pots, hot pots, curry dishes and entrees. If you show up with a large group, the ordering process can be exhausting, with so many dishes — and so much overlap of dishes — that the table can look like one of those Renaissance banquet paintings, with dishes stretching on forever.
