Hong Yun Cafe

Your dining experience here seems to depend on what menu you order from, because there’s actually two menus. One with your standard Chinese American fare like General Tso’s Chicken and Broccoli Beef, but another with foreign and mysterious dishes like garlic sprouts stir fried with pork.
I tried just a duck appetizer because I wasn’t too hungry that day. It was mediocre tasting. Kinda eh. The water they gave me tasted like dishwater. So I told myself I’d drink water when I got home, since I doubted they could provide a cup of fresh tasting water. Coupled with the salty duck this was a problem, because the more of the duck I ate, the thirstier I got. Instinctively I’d reach for the water cup to down a few gulps but I’d have to stop myself at the last second each time, remininding myself of the stale taste. Alas, I forgot at least two times during the course of the meal, and drank about two gulps. It gives a whole new meaning to Chinese water torture.
Oh what’s the inside look like? It’s a purely utilitarian affair. A bunch of steel frame tables and chairs with white tablecloth. The inside smells funny.

The worst Chinese restaurant I have met in Dallas area. I came to this place with my friends recently. We ordered more than 10 dishes. Honestly, none of them make me happy. The food is not fresh. Ingredients are bad, and tasted like they are recooked. I definitely don’t recommend this Chinese restaurant. If you like Chinese food, choose somewhere good, but not here. The upside here is that the service is good. People are nice.

This is the most authentic Chinese Jiazhe cuisine in Dallas. I am from shanghai and the is our most favorite Chinese restaurant. If you like authentic Chinese food, you shall definitely give the place a try. Our favorite dish are the Wuxi rib, fishball soup, Yangzhou tofu strip, xiaolong bum.

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Very authentic menu and cooking. Price is very reasonable. It is rare to find this kind of southern provincial Chinese food outside of China. Hong Yun café is a true gem! My new favorite place to eat!!! They even make their own fish balls. It melts in your mouth with such delicate flavors… Mmmmm… Yum!

Pretty disappointing. Ordered the lunch special to go and they ask if I could pay with cash instead of my card. I don’t carry cash so they took my card anyway. I get back to the office and open my container of Chicken Lo Mein. The chicken was rancid. Fortunately, I hadn’t eaten that much of it. I didn’t even bother trying the egg drop soup.

I like their noodle of Kunshan and fish. but sometime the boss had a row with his wife at lobby of restaurant. So I don’t like that.

A gem!!! All of our family and friends love this family-​run place. They specialize in making authentic southern Chinese food, so if you’re looking for a taste of home or REAL Chinese food, this is it! The place is not fancy and has no frills, but the food is fantastic (the owner makes everything himself) and if you’re looking for a Chinese place that serves something other than cantonese style food, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Also, this isn’t your typical Americanized Chinese food place, so if you’re looking for that, go elsewhere.

The last time I was here was over a year ago, and I remember my experience being quite good so I was excited to go back. The menus are extremely helpful because they have pictures of all the food they offer. Everything looked so good on the menus, but don’t be fooled, the pictures are extremely deceiving! The food was good, but not all that great. The three cup chicken with basil was basically all bones. Another negative was while we were ordering, literally every other thing we wanted was not available. Not having the ingredients for one dish, fine. Not having the ingredients for 3 or more dishes? You got to be kidding me.

The first few times I went there, I was really impressed with the food. The Braised pork with dried vegetable is really good. The pork belly is rich and fatty. But be careful not to eat it too often or you’ll get fat. The slow steamed chicken soup was impressive coming in a soup pot. The service, if you are eating there, is fine. But for to go orders, it seems like the waiter/​waitress can never understand English and not very nice. Come on, I am the customer here, at least act like you are thankful that I am ordering something from here.

quite authentic shanghai dishes!
we had banquet of two tables there.
would go back again.

I stopped by there because the Chinese grocery place across the street was under construction and all the restaurants in there were closed as well. This place had lunch special when I went and everything, almost everything was American style Chinese. Since I wanted to try their Shanghai thick noodles and see how authentic their food was, I went ahead and ordered it. The portion of the noodles was huge. There were not a lot of meat or vegetables in it. The noodles was bland and oily. I had to put a lot of spicy sauce on the noodles to make it taste better. The service was decent and the restaurant looked clean.

My family and I get together for dinner on Sunday’s. 3 out of 4 times it’s a Chinese restaurant and today we tried out Hong Yun Café. Is this place good? I suppose some people might think so. Did I? No. If you don’t know what is what, then you’re in luck because the menu is a huge picture book. Be careful because some foods don’t look like their pictures. I found myself only eating specific foods that tasted the way I thought they should.
Okay, so let’s start with what was good:
Chicken Soup? Perfect. If you’ve ever made your own chicken stock, this is what you’re getting. A perfect soup with a half chicken in the pot and a couple pieces of vegetables. Put in some rice and you’ve got yourself a Chicken and Rice soup that Campbell’s can’t beat. MMM mmm delicious!
The wife wanted to try spicy crispy chicken something or other and it turned out to be spicy popcorn chicken in a cornucopia. It wasn’t half bad, but it certainly didn’t seem like it was particularly Chinese, plus this was one of the dishes that didn’t look like it’s picture in the menu. It was supposed to have some kind of sauce on it, but our chicken was dry, exactly like popcorn chicken.
What was it I didn’t like?
The Xiao Long Bao? They were sweet. They’re not supposed to be sweet. [Buzzer]
The Pork Spare Ribs? They were sweet too. They’re not supposed to be sweet. [Buzzer]
I was really looking forward to devouring them as they’re some of my favorite dishes.
Egg rolls? Meh. They were tiny. The size a roll of nickles.
Green Onion Pancake? Flimsy and bland.
The water tasted terrible. It didn’t prevent me from drinking it but the wife said it tasted like sewer water. I asked her how she knew.
It’s been 4 hours since we were there and my wife and I both are mentioning how we’re still hungry.
Hong Yun Café, if you were a candy, you’d be black licorice. Most people hate you, but every once in a while, you get one person that can’t get enough. Unfortunately, we were all of the former.

I’m not a big fan of traditional rice/​dishes Chinese food, so three stars is actually pretty high for me. This place specializes in Shanghainese cuisine. I’m not surprised that Sam B. was disappointed in the Kung Pao Chicken and Fried Rice– this isn’t what they specialize in. For those that wonder what they do specialize in, just check the menu. It’s all in color pictures with both Chinese and English. Specialties have a little thumbs-​up sign next to the dish.
We ordered:
— Fish fillets in white wine sauce (~$ 9) — this was really tasty and had a nice and strong cooking wine taste.
— Braised pork (~$ 10) — Ours was different from what Josh K. got. Ours came in a tall brown wooden basket with large pieces of pork, including the fatty bits. It definitely wasn’t thin cut, and there were no vegetables.
— Clear rice noodles with pickled vegetables (xue cai) and edamame (~$ 7) — cooked in a light white sauce, my favorite because it was large pieces of noodles, not to heavy in sauce, and flavorful.
— Fish fat with egg white, mushroom, corn ($ 18) — I’m not really sure if the jelly pieces were fish fat, but that’s what I was told. It takes a long time to cook, and they add egg whites so it resembles the fish fat. The bad thing is that this dish is more expensive, but the vegetables (mushrooms and corn) are the canned/​frozen kind.
— Shanghai-​style rice cake (~$ 8) — This is the rice cake pieces (nian gao) sauteed in white sauce (traditionally, it’s cooked with soy sauce). It’s lighter in flavor and includes beef strips, pickled vegetables, and bamboo slices. I thought the flavor was a little bland.
Overall, the service was accommodating and the food was good. But with First Chinese BBQ across the street, I wouldn’t be surprised if this place doesn’t last very long.

Wife went to get carryout from Hong Yun tonight. We spent about $ 25 and were horribly disappointed.
All of the dishes were very greasy. The Moo Shu Chicken was the best tasting of the group but it was horribly oily and left a bad aftertaste. I hope we don’t get sick from it.
The Kung Pao Chicken had an unusual odor and was tasteless. The peanuts were not fresh and we were left with a bad aftertaste.
The combination Fried Rice was cooked into oblivion.
My wife ordered an eggroll and ordered some sweet & sour sauce (said NOT the Duck Sauce). The woman that took the order and totally understood. (repeated the order back). After waiting a while for the food, wife was told they don’t have sweet and sour sauce, only hot mustard and Duck Sauce. When ask how you can NOT have Sweet and Sour sauce when you make sweet and sour pork and chicken, the woman said «well we closed that part of the kitchen». This was about an hour before closing!!!
Wife asked for refund for the eggroll and woman brought out the Sweet and sour sauce that was initially requested. The sweet and sour sauce was horrible and tasted like sugar water with food coloring.
TOGO order did not come with napkins, plasticware, soy sauce.
We threw the order away will NEVER return to this place. Wish we could take away stars in the review.

If I had a choice. I wouldn’t even give it a star… This place is awful! I went there with my family because we drive by it all the time. When we walked in it seemed hopeful because it reminded me a lot about home and how some of the restraunts looked like in china, very simple and barely any decoration with a tank of fish! We started to order food and was recommended the soup and the spicy chicken… Well the way i expected and from the picture of the menu I expected it to be saucy and just very sechuan style. We also ordered some other house specials that the waitress said was good. Well when the food got here the chicken was not what was in the picture… And when we asked the waitress all she said was «well that’s how we make ours» and then the broth was way too salty, the fish that we ordered wasn’t fully cooked so when we asked the waitress again. She actually told my mom that it was just her vision. The fish is fine! Then when the spicy beef came we were all shocked at what we saw! It was more like a huge plate of jalapeños garnished with a few pieces if beef… And that was the best tasting thing on the table and I don’t even like jalapeños! Well none of us wanted to eat the rest if it but my mother and grandmother are people that don’t like to waste food so we decided to take Togo. We asked the already awful waitress to bring us Togo boxes and when she did it wasn’t enough. I asked her to bring me just one more and she actually stood there arguing with me saying that I didn’t need one more and that the really saucy fish can be just put into the box with their nasty version if spicy chicken! And then she just turned around and walked away! All I to say is I REFUSE to ever go back to this place. And to be quite honest… I won’t even miss it if it closed down.

What used to be Ivy’s Café in Plano is now Hong Yun Café serving mostly Shanghainese and some Szechuan style food. There were five of us coming for lunch and we each decided to order a dish from the Chinese menu and share.
The Chinese menu came with lots of clear picture of the food and the staff was very helpful to explain what their Shanghainese specialties are. I ended up ordering fish steak with vegetables and my friends requested for crispy spicy chicken, braised pork, spare ribs, and stir-​fried tofu with vegetables. Everything was Shanghainese except for the crispy chicken which is Szechuanese.
The fish steak came out first and it was served on a large oval plate, so we knew we would have plenty of left over. The dish came with lots of flounder fillet cooked with some fresh vegetables in white sauce; it was very nicely done. Next came the tofu dish; the tofu was deep-​fried and then stir-​fried with various vegetables. I found this dish to be OK; they could have made it more flavorful. After everybody tried the braised pork, we all agreed it was really amazing; this was the only dish that did not have any left over :-). They basically slow-​cooked the the pork in dark sweet sauce, sliced it very thin, and served it with pickled cabbage cooked in the same sauce. We all could not get enough of this unbelievable dish! The crispy chicken was very good; however, I’ve had better ones at the restaurants specializing only Szechuanese food. Lastly, the spare ribs was very good, too. It was cooked in similar sweet sauce as the braised pork and the meat came off easily from the bone.
The dishes that we ordered range from 6.95 to 8.95. This place is definitely gem for taking big group. I will definitely come back for that braised pork!