Deer Garden Signatures

A great place for Chinese (not sure if that’s the technical word) noodles and combos. A noodle bowl seen in the picture is $ 9.50 with a hot tea. Cold drinks and extra toppings cost more but they are all reasonable. The soups and ingredients has the taste of quality. The only real negative is that the food could be more flavourful.
Go for: chinese style noodle combos with available bbt
Don’t go for: short wait times as it is almost always busy, using other forms of payment as it is CASH ONLY

Huge bowl of noodle with lots of ingredients, I’d say worth the money except the side dishes, extra $ for the drinks etc do add up. End up spending around $ 15/​pp.
Side dishes ordered include the pan-​fried beef tongue which was nice and juicy and not chewy at all. Fried chicken wings with ginger small size and I couldn’t really detect much ginger taste (oh well only $ 1.99 for 3 wings)
Plenty of street parking on Fraser.
Service friendly and prompt.

This place is Always so busy. I just like how they have a lot of variety of soups and toppings. It’s actually good. The only downfall is half the time I eat at Deer Garden, somehow there’s always a fricken fruit fly in my soup or they’re so busy they forget about my soup and the noodles have already expanded and the soup is gone and they STILL served it to me!!! Like cmon …

I don’t really understand why this restaurant is getting such low reviews. Some customers are complaining about the new $ 1 charge for a container, but that’s all because of the green movement and trying to minimize waste.
Atmosphere: Very new, modern, and clean.
Food: Pretty good! Half of their soups are non msg. You pick two «toppings,» but they give you a lot! Along with the toppings, every noodle dish comes with mushroom, cabbage, and green onion. Also, the portions of noodles and soup is huge! If you’re not able to eat that much, I suggest splitting with a friend and it comes out to be an even better deal.
Price: For $ 9.50 and for the amount of food you get, it’s a great deal! All orders comes with a regular tea or coffee drink, but you can upgrade to a specialty drink for just $ 2 extra (normally, a specialty drink is $ 4.50-$ 5.00).
Service: Pretty fast! They’re also great about either splitting the bill or combining the bill. Please note, this is a cash only establishment.

If order your food for take out or cannot finish your food and need a take out container they will charge you $ 0.50 per container
This gets two thumbs down from me

Line up at noon on a Saturday which is to be expected. Soup was good, service was fast so can’t complain. It’s a typical Chinese noodle soup place so if you like fish noodle soup, this is the right place for you. Found the noodles to be way too much but some people may like that. Nothing to write home about but everything was as expected.

Typical HK café style service and food. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. As long as you have that in mind when you come, there isn’t much else to say about it. Choose your: noodle, soup, toppings. It comes in a bowl and service is pretty fast if you get noodles. They also have non-​noodle options like baked pork chop with rice, which takes a bit longer.
It’s cheap and quick, but also gets very busy around meal times.

Line up most of the time but don’t let dissuade you. it goes fast. I have been here 3 times and I love it. I always get the laksa with peanut sauce. spicy tasty, so good, huge portions. I love how you pick your broth, noodles, toppings, its so different. more places should do this. you can also get a side for $ 2.00 bucks, get the wings or the beef tongue! Honestly, tongue is amazing. I have only deducted a star for the typical diner service which is always lacking and the lack of space. the tables are crammed together.

I’ve heard all my friends rave on and on about how good this place was prior to my visit of Deer Garden on Fraser street, so I decided to check it for myself to see what the big deal was!
October 2015 this month I sat down on a Wednesday night to find the restaurant crowded and still people waiting out front lobby (Which is a good sign of good food or value.)
We were quickly seated and began to order our food off little paper sheets for our noodles as well as ingredients for our soup base! Each table had a nifty button the side to call the waiters/​waitresses for when it got busy and needed service.
We ordered our food and handed the lady our sheets… while waiting I noticed a small fruit fly in the air, I quickly swatted it out of the air to find him on table not dead but slightly stunned. I was absolutely in a trance watching as it struggled to try to get on its back. After several minutes the fly got on its back and flew away! Noticing that this area had fruit-​flies in the area, it just occurred that this restaurant in my opinion was deemed too unsanitary for me!
Our food arrived and it was good but the knowledge of my fruit-​fly friend and his buddies will make this review from a 4 star to a 1 star.
Sorry but Deer Garden… never again… until I am hungry!

Nosh and Nibble came here after an airport extraction and I ordered the following combo for $ 12:
Egg Noodle in Malay Laksa broth with Beef Tendon and Enoki Mushroom
Hot Lemon Water drink
Pork Cutlet
The tendon and enoki mushroom submerged in the thick broth but they were there. The Malay Laksa broth here was not as spicy as I thought it’d be nor was it as flavourful. Normally laksa has a curry coconut milk or sour tamarind base. The broth I got was kind of creamy and could have been more coconut-​y. The tendon was very tender though and I had around 5 pieces, similar to what you’d find at a Vietnamese restaurant. The enoki mushroom was also standard fare and I had 3 clumps of it absorbed in the broth. The egg noodles were pretty good and absorbed some broth, but if the broth isn’t that good to start, there’s only so much hope for the noodles. I think next time I’ll try another broth because the noodles weren’t bad.
The Hot Lemon Water drink (optional $ 1) came out piping hot. I’m not kidding. It was too hot to drink when it arrived and by the time I finished my noodles it was still too hot to take anything more than micro-​sips. If you like scalding hot temperatures, this is the drink for you.
The Pork Cutlets were an optional side I ordered for $ 1.95. The cutlets were fried quite dark but they didn’t taste overly oily. They came with a creamy mayo sauce for dipping in but I didn’t need to use all of it; the cutlets were quite juicy on their own. Nevertheless, I was very satisfied after finishing everything; a regular person would probable skip the side and still be full from the noodle bowl.

Good value, but be prepared to wait.
Deer Garden is your typical Hong Kong style Café/​Diner.
$ 7 – 10 will get you freshly prepared entrées. Portions are generously portioned, especially the rice and noodle combos. They also have Chinese versions of Western foods like spaghetti and sandwiches which you’ll probably best avoid.
My wife likes to order the custom noodles. You use a pen and fill in an order form. Simply check off your choice of soup base, noodle, meats, vegetables and garnishment. The chef will cook your noodles just the way you like it.
You can eat at Deer Garden for about $ 10 per person. However, all the combos have optional «upgrades» like better drinks or side orders that could bump costs higher. Show some restraint and the value is pretty decent.
On weekends, you need to arrive early to avoid the lunchtime rush. On some weekends, there could be 30+ people waiting outside for a seat.

Love Deer Garden! Whenever I want something soupy, it’s either phở or Deer Garden. It’s a bit pricy compared to phở but I guess it comes with more food. My favorite is their spicy peanut based soup with instant noodles + beef brisket /​liver. Their fish based soup are really good too if you’re looking for something healthier — they claim they don’t use MSG. I only get their instant noodles because after going here so many times, I realized I wasn’t ever able to finish any of the other noodles. For 2 dollars more, I always add pan fried maggi sauce pork and my gf gets the fried chicken wings. Just awesome!

Had dinner here with my boyfriend. He raved about how good it was. You pick a soup base, a noodle and two items from a list. Pretty simple you’d think… BUT they gave me someone else’s noodle bowl. The only thing similar to my choice was the noodles. Service was terrible. Waitress was rude. There in such a rush they can’t even look or talk to you. Based on service I would not come back again! Tones of other noodle soup restaurants in Vancouver to choose from, nothing special here.

The definition of true Chinese fast food. You can get your noodle soup in less than 5 mins which makes it faster than McDonald’s or any other burger joint. The food is solid, soup has tons of flavours and they don’t cheap out on the veggies which I love. Best deal during mini meal time. Soup noodles less than $ 7.

We had wanted to try Non Stop Pizza again but it turned out they were not just closed, but closed down on their Fraser Street location. The whole block (?) was scheduled for demolition and, probably, gentrification.
So my second choice was Deer Garden Signatures, which I’d been curious about but wasn’t about to run out to Richmond for.
There was a line-​up in the tight waiting area, but for our party of five, the wait time was estimated at 10 minutes, even with two parties ahead of us. And it was no lie! In about ten minutes we ended in a spacious booth near the back of the restaurant.
Client demographic looked predominantly under-30’s Chinese, but the fairly young wait-​staff could speak English well and were more polite and patient than at most Chinese restaurants I’ve been to. Points here!
Our orders didn’t all come at the same time, BUT they all came very hot — apparently it’s served as it’s made, no waiting around to serve an entire table at the same time, which risks items getting cold. One order from the menu took longer to prepare and we weren’t told beforehand. But that, too, came out steaming hot, so it’s clear the waitstaff are very prompt with delivering food.
Although the rest of the Fraser/​49^th region looks dilapidated, this restaurant is cleanly renovated on the inside. Booths give a lot of privacy despite the busyness.
If you haven’t been, the protocol appears to be that you press a button at your table if you need service. Eventually, they will come. Press it when your party is ready to order.
They started us with hot tea, and there was no refill afterwards.
There are forms to fill out for their noodles, both at the hostess table and at the tables in the dining room. There are also menus, but read carefully what is available at what time.
A couple of us ordered dishes, which didn’t look so great — so like every other place, Deer Garden Signatures has duds, and our table had wildly swinging opinions from «disgusting» or «not impressed» to «good value» to «tasty».
It’s hard to go wrong with the noodles if you like phở, but some soup bases are definitely tastier than others. Price for portion is also very good. Price for an already fairly big bowl (approximately the size of a standard bowl of phở) is $ 8.95, or around $ 10 after tax and tip. This is comparable to phở, but the mix-​and-​match concept gives you a lot more variety.
For my soup base, I chose «watercress and almonds fish soup», which tasted like fish sauce soup. Which was OK, but way inferior to «peanut sauce & chili soup» which my friend ordered. That was way superior and I highly recommend giving it a go. Watch for the spiciness if you can’t handle that well, though.
Standard items in the soup are green onion, cabbage, bean curd, and mushroom — all of which can be omitted if you specify. The bowls were big enough that none of us wanted to try supersizing it for $ 1.50 more.
I also ordered «desert wings with ginger» ($ 1.95 for 3 wings). OK sized wings. VERY crispy, and stayed crispy for a long time. Moist on the inside. NOT gingery. As wings go they were very nicely deep fried and superior to most «wings» places. Worth a try unless you insist on strong gingery taste.

My buddy got me liking this place, so I visited Deer Garden in different location this time. I had to wait a bit for a table and the restaurant was already busy around 6:30 PM. So I ordered laksa flavoured noodle with 2 toppings and iced coffee together ($ 9.95, $ 8.95 if noodle is ordered with hot drink). They were both amazing and delicious.
Even though their food really amazed me, but service was slow. I got my water first and waiting for my order took longer time. I wanted to give 4 stars but giving 3 stars because of waiting time.

I was really reluctant to come back but after seeing some friends that were urgently needing a fix of their noodle soup I threw my hands in the air and waved them yaddayaddayadda.
Got there at 8:30 and there was already a line out the door. least 5 tables waiting at this point. I thought «Oh Good!» This will prove me right to my friends that their wait is horridly imbalanced to the worth of deer garden fare, But I was wrong and the line shrank after what was a miracle of the actual 8 minutes was within the 10 minute estimate. Never in the history of coming here have I ever sat down this quickly. After sitting we did not wait long for the servers to come take our order sheets. *note they changed the back rooms to a bell system for quicker than the hand up method.
The MSG free fish soup was good and had plenty of meats in them, even the request of Extra cabbage and onions have been granted and I was satisfied. My friends, at first not impressed when their order got mixed up, the servers looked confused what to do in order to save this soup from being wasted. In the end their original items got put on the side dish and the soups were saved from being discarded, so everyone was happy in the end.
Redeemed, Yes. Will I come back? Probably. Mess ups are fine it’s how you deal with them that counts. Shoving people aside and ignoring them while on their phones will not do anything but shorten your line. Glad the manager took care of the «Entitled locust» problem, I didn’t see them at all this time.

Deer gardens got the build your own noodle! I didn’t know they had that in Vancouver and I thought it was only in Richmond! So excited! The premise is you choose your soup base, your noodle type and 2 toppings. More toppings cost more and there are cheap side dishes too. I got the spicy peanut sauce with the hot stuff on the side. So it was just a peanut based soup. Very rich and creamy with lots of peanut flavour. For the noodles I got the sweet potato crystal noodles. Very light and a good texture to balance the heaviness of the soup. The toppings I got beef and tendon, heavier than normal but it was after a game and I was hungry. Both were cooked very well and definitely generous portions provided!

Tried this place for the first time today. This location opened more than a year ago. Had the soup noodle and was quite impressed. For $ 8.95, you get a choice of soup base, choice of type of noodle, 2 toppings and a drink. Totally decent price and food was flavorful. This place gets busy but the turnover is pretty fast. Food comes pretty fast. The only downside is they only take cash. Hate that.

Checked this out for the first time today, and was pretty impressed. Reminded me of HK ‘train noodle’ shops where you get to pick your own ingredients and soup base. The resto is clean, spacious. Loved their variation of soup bases (I had the tomato pumpkin fish soup, apparently they’re known for their laksa). My only critique is that the soup could have been a bit more tomato-​y but the fish part of the broth tasted really good. Portions were huge, I could only finish half my bowl. I also ordered an iced lemon tea (Half sweet) and was pleased to see they actually listened and didn’t over sweeten my drink — bonus they seal the cup so you can take it to go!
Will definitely come back again to try their other broths!