On Dong Chinese Restaurant

Went for lunch. It’s a cross between Korean and Chinese, mostly Chinese. Service was a bit slow but the restaurant was crowded so that’s understandable. Food was fresh and hot, but lacked taste and portions were small with prices kind of high around $ 14 per person if family style sharing.

Good food here… korean, northern Chinese style… the spicy noodle aka Campooong ramen is da bomb here… except for the occasional bugs flying here lol… sweet sour pork etc… most of the dishes here. pretty good.price is decent… once again don’t like the occasional bugs flying around. hey I’m a Unilocaler lol

delicious korean style chinese food!
i know that sounds kind of weird, but those of us who have lived in korea know exactly what chinese food is like over there! I’ve never found a place like this one, and aside from having to drive from where i live in ewa beach, i dont really care to look for another one! it’s perfect for the kind of chinese food cravings i get. healthier than the american style

Since we’ve moved into the Ala Moana neighborhood, I’m finding this area to be very «dangerous»…um, dangerous to my NOT so svelte elderly figure! There are so many eating places around… some dressy and some hole-​in-​the-​wall types.
We were on one of our walks when we passed by this nondescript restaurant frontage. I was actually eyeing out Honu Bakery and chuckling at the name of the establishment next door because it reminded me of a Beamer Brothers song…“Mr. Sun Cho Lee”. Eh, that’ll be another story. Anyway, On Dong Northern Chinese Restaurant’s glass picture window caught my husband’s eye. We knew nothing about it until I checked my handy Unilocal App only to find a review by Bruddah Fran C. Geez, this guy really gets around!
The restaurant was packed but there was one last table available that we were welcomed into by two charming Korean ladies. What? Didn’t the sign say «Northern Chinese»?! Oh, I bypassed the history lesson to my husband as we perused the menu of Korean/​Chinese food. We are and have been longtime fans of another nearby Northern Chinese restaurant so we had some basis of comparison dishes to try.
THE FOOD:
— Banchan: several small plates of house made pickled turnip, kimchee and chopped raw onion with bean sauce were served. The Napa cabbage kimchee looked fiery hot with its red chilie peppers but was surprisingly not spicy. We actually asked for a refill as our food was served because my husband insisted on ordering a bowl of steamed rice.
— Noodles with seafood and bean sauce aka Jajangmyeon: Just as flavorful as its nearby fellow Northern Chinese restaurant with its chewy noodles. The bean sauce was a little bit thinner or watery but nonetheless very tasty. As far as seafood, all I could see was shrimp. The serving size is good for sharing or one very hungry noodlehead. Ha… I DID share.
— Gan Poong Chicken (Ggan pung gi) or deep fried chicken in garlic sauce: Peking-​style spicy fried chicken served with a mixture of dried or fresh chilie peppers, garlic, green onions lightly tossed in a sweet brown sauce. The chicken was fried crisp and still retained much of that crispness even though it had been tossed into a sauce. The boneless chicken pieces were juicy and flavorful. My husband ate most of this dish which he claimed satisfied his penchant for fried foods.
— Boiled dumplings aka mandoo: 10 plump and juicy pork filled dumplings were served. Each dumpling could’ve easily been two bites and its wrapper was light and translucent.
We «wiped» our flavorful dishes. Service was a little slow but we expected it as this restaurant was filled with other hungry people. One of the servers told us that this establishment has been here for 30 years and has a huge following from both the Korean and Chinese communities. After tasting these few dishes, we can understand why and we’ll be back for more.
#467

The service is the best I ever had at a Korean restaurant! Lol! Food was good and it was a lot! Looked like they renovated so it is very clean and nice inside! Thank you On Dong for your great service and friendly hospitality!!!

Every thing was very tasty. The service was quick and efficient. The sweet and sour shrimp and the Kung PAO chicken were both excellent.

I ordered jjampong. I had a spoonful of soup before noticing what I thought was a bean in with all the vegetables and noodles. It was a ROACH.
When they’d brought our order over, there were the two bowls we had ordered plus one for the table behind us. When I started hyperventilating, my date called over the waitress and showed her. She started speaking quietly and asked him to lower his voice so the people behind us couldn’t hear the conversation about the jjampong they were eating happily.
We were asked if we wanted two new bowls. I said, «is it from the same pot?» Bottom line is YES. Well of course we did not want two new bowls. My kid was hungry so we stayed, even though I had lost my appetite.
Then, they DIDN’T even take the two bowls of jjampong off the bill. At that point, I said pay it. We never went back.

The name of this place is a bit misleading because the food is Korean and not Chinese.
But moving past that, the food is bomb! Our Korean friend brought us here and we were not disappointed!
We ordered jjajangmyeon (black bean noodles), jjampong (spicy seafood noodles), and tangsuyuk (sweet/​sour/​crispy pork). Everyone of these dishes were on point! I’m not normally a fan of jjampong because from my experience broths have been bland and overly spicy. However the jjampong both here was flavorful and just the right amount of spice for me.
The kimchee and pickled daikon are made in house and really good! Our server was attentive and checked on us throughout our meal.
I don’t know if I can go back to Washington and eat these dishes there anymore. The food here has spoiled me.

A Korean style Chinese restaulant.
Although people are nice, but if you are familiar with Chinese food. You may want to consider other places as well.

Chinese food is great. Korean food is very good. Together? Ehhhh, maybe not. In this case, it’s Korean style Northern Chinese food with Korean flavors, so… it’s pretty much Korean food that’s just influenced by Northern Chinese Cuisine. Yeah? Yeah. It bothers me that this restaurant has the «Northern Chinese Cuisine» signage on the front because it’s far from it.
I’ve never had Chinese food prepared Korean style, so I was excited to come here, and even more so from reading a few Unilocal reviews. I believe I have a good understanding of Chinese flavors or else I’ll have dishonored my family, and I know Korean cuisine is well-​known for its fermentation of vegetables and pastes.
Of course, the Jajangmyeon was seemingly highly recommended. I’ve had the original Chinese version, Zhajiangmian a few times, so I was expecting it to be almost alike since it uses similar ingredients and a fermented soybean paste. Umm, I don’t remember it being cold, bland, fragrant-​less, flavor-​less, sugary-​sweet. The bowl of noodles was cold as if the noodles were cooked then strained through cold water, put in a bowl, and then scooped in the room temperature jajang sauce from a pot sitting on a table. The sauce was bland as bland can be. There was no fragrance of any kind either. The fermented black bean paste is the main ingredient, and it’s supposed to be fried in a pan to intensify its fragrance and brighten its flavor. What happened? It’s supposed to be salty! It’s fermented for goodness sake! It tasted like Sweet Bean Paste that was scooped from a jar and mixed with water and added with tablespoons of sugar. I’ll pass. Keep it for yourself. Thanks.
The Sweet Sour Pork. It was $ 15.95, which seemed ridiculously overpriced. I had to order it from the good reviews, and I had this similar dish at Lobster King that was very good. The portion was small, but looked appetizing. And again, not what I expected. Again, this was bland. I could barely taste the sweet and the slightest hint of sour. It’s never good when you find yourself forcing down bland food or always dipping it in numerous sauces. The pork had just too much batter and was fried poorly, and it ate chewy and tough.
The Shrimp Fried Rice was an even smaller portion. Thank goodness this had some taste to it! Though, why is there corn and French style green beans in this? Peas look good. Boy, those carrots are diced so evenly, and the peas are so green. Wait a minute… Hang on a second… perfectly diced carrots? Green peas? Green beans? CORN? This couldn’t be from a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, could it? Sadly, this was obviously the case, as the rice was very mushy from the water from the frozen vegetables. There was zero wok heat, so it didn’t even feel like a fried rice. Just stick with Korean food, thanks.
For the banchan, there was only kim chee, raw sweet onion with the black bean paste, and pickled daikon. This was probably the best part of this meal. The kim chee was good, as it should be. The pickled daikon was good with a nice level of flavor. I enjoyed the raw onion with the black bean paste because the paste actually had flavor.
The service was okay. One server was awful, while the other was nice. We just sat down and one of the servers wanted to take our order after thirty seconds. Okay? A bit more time, please? Thanks. She came back less than a minute. –_​– Then she got lost her patience and said, «Just wave when you’re ready.» When we were ready and tried to get her attention, she just stayed busy doing this and that without ever looking our way. Finally the other server came over and took our order and then brought our banchan. The food came out somewhat slow, but the nicer server was very attentive and friendly.
This place is pretty small with a pay-​to-​park lot in the back you can enter from Kaheka. The décor feels very old-​fashioned with the booth seating and the style of tables and the plates and bowls.
Overall, I did not enjoy this place one bit. I tried the popular dishes, and they both failed miserably. At the end of the day, it’s Korean food. It’s not even close to Northern Chinese cuisine. If you took the hamburger, and replaced the beef patty with a steamed pork patty with water chestnuts and preserved cabbage and a salted egg on top served in a sesame hamburger bun, would you still call it «American Cuisine?»
I may have a solution though. There’s Americanized and Localized Chinese cuisine here that do well. Chop Suey, everywhere! Now we have this Koreanized Chinese cuisine here at On Dong that’s not so well. Take a page from those other restaurants and Lobster King especially who do make decent Koreanized Chinese dishes, and hire Chinese chefs. I feel they’ll be better at cooking «Northern Chinese Cuisine,» right? Plus, isn’t that how it went? Northern Chinese people emigrated from China and into Korea, lived in a certain area, and then developed pseudo-​version of Chinese food to assimilate to Korean tastes?

I come from China and am taking my parents for a tour. I am trying to find some good Chinese food for them since American food doesn’t seems interest them at all after a couple days of American food. Then I find this one on Unilocal with 4 stars! I went through the photos of the dishes and looks «similar» to Traditional Chinese food! It’s partly my fault that I didn’t realized that «on Dong» is somewhere Korea and is famous for noodles. Again it looks like Chinese name but it is not!
Yet when I arrived at there, I realized that except that one waiter/​owner who served us speaks Chinese, nothing else is Chinese! It’s a traditional Korean restaurants and all the customers next to us are Korean! It did remind me of Korean TV shows. But! But definitely not a place if you are looking for some delicious and traditional Chinese food!
I am ranking it only two stars not because of its food is not delicious (it might be delicious not to us but to people who love the Korean style), but because it says Chinese when it is really not, and because that I want to raise awareness for people like me who are trying to find some hometown taste of China in Honolulu.

I cannot wait to come back! It’s located like 30 ft from the Panda Express at King and Kalakaua.
Black bean seafood noodles (no way can I pronounce the Chinese name for this dish). I saw pics on Unilocal and loved what I saw, so I tried ordering over the phone «Can I please get the jyanjanmuysddfghjkk for carry out» and they were really confused by my terrible pronunciation and politely asked me to order in person. I didn’t mind. I showed up and tried ordering it again but I had a really hard time pronouncing this word that I’d never heard of, I only knew the dish by Unilocal photo, so finally pointed to some kids lunch at a nearby table and said «I’ll have what he’s having.» And they said «ooohhhh jyanjanmuysddfghjkk» and approved of my choice.
The ladies who worked at the register were friendly and let me sit down at a booth while I waited. They were speedy too. I’ll be coming back as soon as I burn off the calories from my recent visit. I suggest you try it!
Pro tip: just ask for a number 4. I really wish I had known that when I tried calling initially but I had a hard time finding a reliable menu online.
(Also, spicy seafood soup was yummy too!)

Been a while. Love their jjajangmyun and kangpoong chicken

The only Korean word you’ll need to know here? Jjajangmyeon! Chewy noodles smothered in a thick and savory black bean sauce with bits of onions. While it may not look, nor sound, appealing let me tell you it’s soo delicious. Comfort food for many, and with one bite you’ll understand why. A must have accompaniment is a heaping plate of sweet and sour pork. On Dong’s version is sweet without being overly saccharine. The sticky sauce goes well with jjajangmyeon, but I suspect it would be even better with rice!
$ 1/​per hour located in the back. The restaurant itself it’s very large so during lunch or busy dinner hours, there is a wait time.

My wife picked this place and didn’t research it first. I was a little surprised when I was greeted in Korean and had kimchi brought out at «On Dong Chinese Restaurant.»
This was my first ja jiang myun so I don’t have a good point of reference. It just tasted kind of bland to me. Noodles and black beans. I’ll have to go to Eastern Paradise to compare.
The Gan Poong Chicken was a crazy good. Crispy, meaty, spicy and garlicky. Would come back just for the chicken.
The pork fried rice was normal pork fried rice. It needed more white pepper but I added it at the table.
The service was attentive and our server brought us some food scissors when she saw we were having trouble with the noodle length.
Pleased with the service and atmosphere. Not sold on the food yet but it may be my unfamiliarity with the Korean influenced Chinese food.

Haven’t been here in a while and wanted some Jajang myun so went to On Dong. They are pretty busy because they are consistent with their food. Their service is very good and they are the only ones that I know of that gives you kimchi, takuan and onions as sides. Normally you only get two out of the three.
I would have given them 5 stars if the sauce was a little thicker with more flavor. Trust me as bad as it may sound they are still the best in HI. Their beef tangsuyoke (sweet & sour) is very good and crispy. It was a pleasant lunch with the family on a Sunday afternoon.
One negative is parking is in the back which you have to pay for. $ 1 an hr.

I am very sad that this place is closed due to a fire. It was a complete shock as that day I was craving some chachamyun.
I’m having to find my fix at other locations, while nice. This place had their own specific style that no other place in Honolulu can replicate. Especially their beef tansuyok… even their choice of side dishes had a certain taste you can find at other places.
I’ve heard the chef is working at another restaurant and I literally am looking for that new place in hopes the same food is being served there.
I do hope On Dong re-​opens. It’s been there for many years.

Three words: black bean noodles.
Hollaaaa if you like jajangmyun because this is where it’s at. There are two places on the island that we frequent for black bean noodles and it’s On Dong and Eastern Paradise. For those of you that don’t know, this isn’t a standard «Chinese» cuisine type restaurant. It’s actually Koreanized (I made this word up but please bear with me). This dish originated in China but it was eventually brought over to Korea where the dish has been altered and adapted to Korean palates. On Dong caters to the Koreanized version of black bean noodles. I guess you can call it like a Korean-​Chinese hybrid.
The black bean noodles here are probably the best on the island. I definitely prefer the noodles here in comparison to Eastern Paradise. The noodles are the right consistency and the sauce is perfectly seasoned. My mom usually gets the double portion and I just eat some of hers.
A great appetizer to order is the sweet and sour pork. I think you can choose beef as an option too but trust me when I say to choose pork. Pork wins hands down. The sauce is nice and thick, it’s «sweet and sour» without being overly sweet nor sour. It also comes with lots of veggies and these really awesome black stringy mushroom type things.
The jjamppong is also pretty good. It’s a spicy seafood noodle soup. Most people will order this or the jajangmyun. Just keep in mind that it is pretty spicy and if you’re not big on spicy then stick to what you know.
There is lots of free parking available in the back and a few street parking stalls in front. If you want to try some black bean noodles, I definitely recommend On Dong. The main reason I deducted 1 star is because it can be a little on the pricey side depending on what you order.

Northern Chinese Cuisine is very similar to Korean with the kim chee sides and spicy flavors.
Their signature dishes is the black bean noodle (ja jang myun or other variations of spelling) and spicy seafood noodle soup (Jampong). For the later, it’s full of seafood flavor, they even added some sea cucumber.
Both dishes comes with kim chee, pickled daikon, and onion. It’s a good deal for about $ 10.
Parking is available in the back of the restaurant, make a right on Kaheka from King St.

Delicious but not my style, I’m not a huge fan of Korean food so this Chinese/​Korean concept was new to me.
Service was OK, food OK, I ate everything cause I was so hungry. Glad I gave this place a try but I’m in no rush to come back.