Inchin’s Bamboo Garden – Mira Mesa

Recently my co-workers and I checked out another new restaurant in Mira Mesa called Inchin’s Bamboo Garden. It’s located in the Mira Mesa Mall next to L&L Hawaiian BBQ, Ding Tea, and Crab Hut. This location used to be Mandarin Garden & Bar and waaaaaaaay before that it was Callahan’s (before they moved across the street to where the Broken Yolk is now).

I forgot to take any interior photos of Inchin’s Bamboo Garden but it’s been spiffed up quite nicely. Cool decor and it looked like they had a place for wine storage for when they get their liquor license. Each table has a little condiment holder with various sauces in it. My little Funko Pop is here showing it off a little. 

This is Inchin’s Bamboo Garden’s lunch menu which features lunch specials served with a vegetable spring roll, soup, and salad of the day. 

And here is Inchin’s Bamboo Garden’s drink menu. 

While we chatted and waited for food, our first item arrived. I wondered what the heck it was until our waiter said, “Here’s your salad.”

I kind of stared at the plate and looked at my co-workers with a quirked eyebrow. This isn’t what I expected when I read there would be a “salad”. It’s a small dish with bean sprouts, green onion, and sesame seeds. There was some kind of dressing or sauce on it. They were crunchy. It tasted fine. But yeah…. this isn’t what I expected when I heard “salad”. But okay.

The waiter also assured me I would get all of my vegetables with this meal since my lunch special would have vegetables AND there was salad.

Maybe he was just messing with me. 

Our lunches came with Hot & Sour Soup which is like…. my least favorite soup ever. I had a tiny sip and it was very sour. My co-workers said it just tasted like cornstarch. 

On the side is a veggie spring roll. That DID have a lot of vegetables in it. Maybe that’s what our waiter meant when I would get plenty of vegetables?

At this point we waited. And waited. And waited for our food. 

Our waiter came by and apologized for the wait. Apparently he forgot to actually put our order into the kitchen. Hmm. He offered us complimentary drinks which we ordered. 

Then our food finally came out! And the guy serving the food gave everyone the wrong plate of food. This is Cris’s Hot Garlic Shrimp with fried rice. Then after the snafu we switched to the correct plates. And David didn’t have the correct food at all and they had to go and put his order back into the kitchen. Hmm.

I got the Manchurian Shrimp with Brown Rice [$12] and I added a side of Hakka Noodles with Chicken [$4]. Our waiter didn’t tell us which bowl of noodles was which. Only one had chicken in it and we couldn’t tell by looking because the chicken pieces were tiny. David ended up with my chicken noodles. But that’s okay because he got his food really late. And when he finally DID get his food, it was still wrong (wrong sauce). But he didn’t care and just wanted to eat at that point. David’s meal got comped for the additional wait, but then he had to remind the waiter that it would be comped when we got the bill. Hmm.

Remember how I said the waiter told me my food came with vegetables? Uhhh. I didn’t see any vegetables swimming in that bowl of sauce with my shrimp. I’m not quite sure why my shrimp was put into a separate bowl with an insane amount of sauce in it. The shrimp itself were really plump and and on the large-ish side. There were only four shrimp in the entire bowl though.

Four. Four shrimp.

I’m not quite sure how to describe the “manchurian” sauce. I asked our waiter at the beginning and he said a bunch of kind of confusing things including “it’s kind of like pico de gallo, it’s not spicy, but it’s not pico de gallo, you know what I mean?” I got that, yes, it’s not spicy, but otherwise it was not an apt description. It was kind of a watered down sweetish-sourish sauce. It was fine. Not amazing. The shrimp tasted good, I just didn’t quite understand the need for so much sauce.

We were all curious about the side of Hakka Noodles and indulged in them. It’s kind of like eating a skinnier version of lo mein noodles with bits of vegetables in it. I wouldn’t pay an extra four bucks for it though. Maybe two bucks. But not four. 

Overall I wasn’t really impressed with this meal. When we went, Inchin’s Bamboo Garden had only been open for one week, so perhaps it’s the “ahhh we just opened!” chaos that a lot of restaurants experience at first. I might try them again down the road and see if they work the kinks out. Maybe. Hmm.

Inchin’s Bamboo Garden
8242 Mira Mesa Blvd
San Diego, CA 92126