The BF and I went to dinner with my parents tonight and surprisingly, they actually went to a restaurant we picked! Usually, they ask us to pick a restaurant, we make a choice, and then my mom overrides the choice and we end up going to one of our usual places instead, such as Pho 79, so I’m not really complaining.

The place was pretty small and packed by the time we got there, so we had to wait around for a bit, but boy, was it worth the wait. If you’re a fan of spicy food, or flavorful food in general, Chung King is worth trying out. It’s even vegan friendly! Well, if you speak Chinese, I guess. Pics and full review after the jump.


We started off with some cold appetizer plates. I think it’s about $4 for a combination of any 3 appetizers you pick from a buffet shelf at the back of the restaurant where they ring up your check. We got two plates. This one is the vegetarian one. The spicy cabbage was kind of bland. I’m not a fan of celery, so I thought that was only mediocre. I do like bean-sprouts though and their bean-sprout salad was pretty tasty.

I didn’t have much of the vegetarian plate because the meat-eaters appetizer plate caught my attention instead. Spicy slices of pig ear — spicy and flavorful. Slices of spicy cured beef — my favorite of all the appetizers. Brined chicken feet — the flavor was good, but it was a bit too chewy for me.

The mapo tofu was good, but the BF thought it tasted too heavily of peppercorn. It did have that mouth-numbing peppercorn taste, but I didn’t think it was that strong. Ma in Chinese means ‘numbing’ so I thought the restaurant did this dish well.

These spicy cubes of breaded chicken bites are a signature dish of the restaurant and was my family’s favorite. The BF has no say in it, but I think he’d pick this as the winner too if he ate chicken. It was so mouth-numbingly spicy and a bit salty, but it was so hard to stop eating. The weird thing was, compared to another table, we had a higher ratio of chile peppers than chicken while the other table had the opposite. Maybe next time I need to give the special wink that says, “Give us more chicken plz.”

I think the spiciness scared my parents away, or at least my grandfather away, but I’m definitely going to return for more of that chicken.

Chung King
1000 S San Gabriel Blvd
San Gabriel, CA 91776
(626) 286-0298

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