After looking at Emeryville Marina, have a meal at Hong Kong East Ocean Seafood Restaurant. Among other Cantonese and Chinese cuisune places to visit, this restaurant can be one of the best. Have a good time here and share nicely cooked fried prawns, Dim sum and har gow with your friends. Good mango pudding, mango dessert and fruitcake are the tastiest dishes. Here you may order delicious wine. This place is known for great jasmine tea. At Hong Kong East Ocean Seafood Restaurant, you can get a takeout. Many guests underline that employees are competent at this place. The exotic atmosphere will be exactly just what you need after a long working day. This spot has got Google 4.1 according to the visitors' opinions.
We ventured into this restaurant as part of a day out at Berkeley Beach. The dishes exceeded our expectations, especially the signature dishes: Crab Meat & Shrimp Crystal Dumplings, Oysters in Shells, BBQ Pork, Clams in Spicy Herbs Soup, and Fish Fin/Abalone/Shrimp/Pork Dumpling Soup.
Moreover, the breathtaking views from the restaurant added to the overall experience. We thoroughly enjoyed our lunch and highly recommend this restaurant.
Food: 5
Service: 4
Atmosphere: 5
Can confirm, the bad reviews here are accurate. Beware of the rude audacity of the waitstaff for banquet menus.
If you care about service do not come here. Do NOT throw your birthday or wedding banquet party here.
I spent $2250 ($343 tip included, receipt posted on here for reference) for the night for 23 people, two tables. The beautiful bay view is not worth it, nor was the food to ever return again.
I would recommend Harbor View on Embarcadero, or R&G lounge or great eastern in SF Chinatown. They were having the Chinese parade the Saturday of my banquet so that was not an option.
Reasons for bad service: the 18% tip is mandatory and included, so they didn't care at all. In fact they (the man on the black suit and the man in the white vest) were straight rude about everything including getting water refilled and taking away empty plates. The server in the white vest practically throws the soup onto the table. And anyone who thinks it's because we were bad customers, no way (plus we didn't want our food tampered with so we kept our composure), we just weren't regulars (who they were very polite to the table next to us, which honestly feels like they were rubbing it in, a high contrast to our treatment as customers).
AND They talked back (in Cantonese)!
Examples:
1. My cousin: hands over empty plate to help server
Server: can't you see I'm doing something, let me finish this first
2. The table has 11 soup bowls for my family table. The server comes out with the big soup bowl and takes one bowl away, and my family member says, we have 11 people at this table, and the server says, "this banquet menu is for 10, you have 11". Which the restaurant knew about two weeks prior when I reserved the two tables. My family member politely then asked, can you distribute the soup between 11 and give us each less soup then? Which he then did, because why not and why even mention that the banquet menu was for 10? RUDE
We needed water at my friend table so I went and brought the empty pitcher to the waiter in the black suit and he said "OK wait, I'll do it later", then while I was standing around talking to my family members at the family table, he hands over to me a filled water pitcher. Okay? So I do his job and walk it over to my friend table. What a punk, seriously.
The smoked black cod was undercooked at my family table and they had to send it back to have it cooked some more.
Also, when it was time to cut the birthday cake into pieces for my guests, he basically tried to fling each piece of cake onto the plate like it had a disease, and butchered the whole thing. Enough so that one piece flipped onto the table, and wasted it. The cake was from Cherry Blossom in SF, so delicious, and a misfortune to lose even one slice (which I think was their intention).
Also, for a banquet party they didn't even give new plates mid 9 course meal (after crab, and no hand towels, which R&G lounge provides). Also because my friends are artists and queer, I think it might be the reason for their caustic attitude. My table of friends mostly did not know Cantonese besides myself, so the waitstaff couldn't talk back to us, since their English is not great.
But because I have a lovely family and wonderful friends, they all laughed about it in the end. And we definitely will never be returning.
I recommend Cantonese speaking people do the same, unless you want some inspiration on a comedy skit highlighting the audacity of the wait staff at Hong Kong east ocean, then this is the place for you.
Food: 2
Service: 1
Atmosphere: 1
