Chef Jon’s Chinese Restaurant

I was there for lunch. Schzwan Tofu tasted good. Veggie rolls are good. Reasonably priced.

It sucks to return to the States from Asia and have to eat asian food! The asian food in the States is NEVER as good. Oh well, I gotta eat.
Still reminiscing the Xiao Long Bao (soup dumplings) I had a few months ago from Din Tai Fung, Taipei, I decided to stop by Chef Jon to get a dose of Xiao Long Bao. What makes a good Xiao Long Bao? For me, 1) needs to be juicy 2) meat cooked just right 3) skin is thin but not to thin where it will break easily 4) served hot.
What I don’t like about this place:
Well, the Xiao Long Bao here only met my item #4. The skin is way too think. I can’t eat the top part of the bao, yeah, it’s that thick.
What I like about this place:
It is good to know that they serve salty soy milk, and salty tofu pudding on the weekends. When there is a craving for Shanghainese food, I know I don’t have to drive far to get them. The marinated beef slice, and gluten are pretty good. The Winey Sweet Rice Ball soup is quite authentic.
Beggers can’t be choosers! I am thankful that Chef Jon’s is around the corner whenever I feel like decent Chinese food.

The lunch special was not much of a special at all. Very overpriced and the value was not there. The restaurant workers are not polite, and the proprietor is rather rude. Food is nothing special and rather plain.

This will be my last time at Chef Jon’s. Our family was there on XMAS Day and was deeply disappointed. The food was good when we finally got it but the service was atrocious. It was torture just to get water and utensils and one of the dishes came out after we finished our meal. Needless to say, we sent it back. It’s too bad that they don’t understand how to train their staff and treat their customers.

The food here is great. They used to have an amazing lunch special but it recently changed. It used to be less than $ 7 for soup, white or fried rice, and an entrée from the lunch menu. Now it is slightly more, I think $ 7.95, no soup, only white rice, and it is only a lunch sized portion of the entrée from the lunch menu. The increase in price for getting less was sad for me but the food is still good, the portions are fine, and $ 7.95 is still an overall good price. My husband enjoys their more authentic dishes and he loves the udon noodles. I am a big fan of their general tso’s chicken. The service is not great but it is still better than some other chinese restaurants I have been to. The food is good enough to keep me coming back.

Had lunch there today and had the garlic chicken with broccoli. I was a little suspicious when it came out and it was only a little warm. Usually at most Chinese restaurants its served hot to the point you need to blow on it to cool it down. After about a half hour after I left I got terrible stomach cramps and spent a good amount of time in the bathroom. 4 hrs later my stomach is still rumbling.

This is rounding out the reviews from my family trip to NYC/​NJ. My dad is a unique individual, and somehow we ended up in the middle of NJ and he was craving chinese food. I was like this probably isn’t the best area to eat that genre of food. But, lucky for us, we had Unilocal to aide in that search. We were able to find this joint in the back of a strip center. The food was actually semi-​authentic. I had very low expectations, but we were able to order a variety of dishes and eat them family style. It made my dad happy, which is sometimes all you can hope for.

Nice People, Fast and Good. Go there once a week

We won’t be coming back. They don’t serve crispy noodles and duck sauce, their entrees are the same price as Mr. Chu’s or Bill and Harry’s (which both taste MUCH better) but don’t come with soup, spring roll, anything! So if you want the same amount of food as you get at other Chinese restaurants, you end up paying twice as much.
And what normally comes with the check at Chinese restaurants? Fortune cookies, right? Not at Chef Jon’s. Just the check. I left hungry and confused. There are many better Chinese restaurants around that serve tastier food at more fair prices.

I love chef Jon’s… It has become the go to place for my kids and I. The food is amazing, nothing like the typical Chinese restaurant you’re used to. I suppose evidence of that would be the fact that most of the customer in the place are, actually, Chinese! the item we get every time is the tofu vegetable soup — it comes in a large bowl that we all share. After we finish the soup we enjoyed different array of entrees every time we go… It doesn’t matter if its an old standby like general Tso’s chicken, or something odd like jellyfish & green beans in garlic sauce, it is always delicious.

Read this review with the knowledge that I have not set foot inside Chef Jon’s, but rather only experienced them via takeout /​delivery.
The food is good. Quite good actually. They have a 3+1 dinner special for $ 24 which is a bargain and a half. Am I going to mistake myself for being in Beijing or Chengdu after this meal? No. Flushing? Again no, but we’re getting close. Edison? Let’s go with that. Their spicy dishes aren’t half bad. Considering you get 3 full dishes for $ 24 plus a soup, it’s tough to beat that.

Had the dumplings, shrimp dumplings and red bean cake for desert. Good comfort food. I liked it and it is good. Family friendly and clean. Nice place for dinner with good Chinese food and some good specials.

We went for Chinese style breakfast. There was only one other table occupied which raised our suspicions. The booth we sat in was dirty (food on seat) and smelly. We moved to another booth which also had the same problem. It’s a Chinese restaurant, so I expected poor service. But our waiter’s attitude and service was below even Chinese restaurant norms. The soy milk tasted burnt and already sweetened — normally, other restaurants let you add the sugar to your taste. The radish buns (蘿蔔絲餅) were good but they were tiny, and tiny is no exaggeration. At least the beef wraps (牛夾餅) were good. We won’t be going back even though they may have other good dishes.

Was not planning on ever returning but coworkers wanted to go here so I acquiesced. All I can say is that it reinforced my mantra that «there must be good Chinese food somewhere in NJ because this ain’t it’
The «waiters» impersonal and inept. Cleanliness is definitely not next to godliness here. The foods ordered were at best ok and more often tasteless.
If you want respectable (notice I did not say good) Chinese food, go to Ashia on Rt 46 in Parsippany and cross this place off your list of places to go.

This Place is Great, I took my wife there for her Birthday she loved it to, they have a traditional Chinese menu, and an Americanized Chinese menu, whats the difference you ask? if it has sweet and sour chick, General Tso’s Chicken, or anything you can have delivered in a white Chinese take out box it’s Americanized. my Point is they have both, and both are done really well, the food was great the greater was nice. We will be eating there again.

Great Shanghainese food at an unexpected location. Try the Chinese meatball and the «grandma» braised pork. The dinner sets have tons of selection at a very reasonable price.

We stopped in here today for lunch, and were very pleased with the $ 8.95 lunch specials. I had Chicken and Shrimp Hunan Style, and my partner had Jumbo Shrimp with Lobster Sauce.
Portions were a very nice size, and food was fresh, hot and tasty. There really were jumbo shrimp — something you don’t find too often anymore. I especially loved the sauce on my dish — it was savory, a little spicy, and the black beans gave it a nice kick.
The Hot and Sour soup was OK — nothing special.
Service was a bit too quick — they brought out our entrees while we were still eating our soup. We are not slow eaters — they should have checked first. We understand they are likely catering to the business lunch crowd, but even still — just a bit too rushed.
We’ll definitely come back when we are in the area.

I’ve been to Chef Jon’s on multiple occasions and appreciated the food here, but a recent experience just killed it.
In addition to placing wrong orders for us, it was an extremely hot day (more than 80 degrees). Yes, I get that we don’t normally anticipate this weather in September, but if you have customers, don’t be cheap about the AC. The staff left the front door open, hoping that the 80-​degree wind-​less air would help cool its customers. We were seated in a back corner with almost no ventilation, sweating a storm while eating. We asked a wait staff to turn on the AC, and he said he’ll check up on that and went to his boss to ask. He came back and told us that the AC is broken. That’s got to be a lie. You would’ve known that beforehand, and wouldn’t need to ask your boss. This place was just too cheap to turn it on. Oh, and the infuriating thing is that later on, I saw the boss take a personal fan and place it only within his vicinity at the cashier’s desk.

When my dad takes 10 minutes to goes out of his way to find out where the chefs came from, their specialty dishes, and order the entire asian meal and doesn’t offer anything but praises for the food, you know it’s good. We had a mix of Shanghainese and spicy Sichuan food. The soup dumplings were well proportioned with soup vs. meat vs. dough. «Lionhead» meatballs (named for their size not ingredient) were rich with flavor. The baked turnip pastries were airy and full of umami flavor, just a little small like a mini-​muffin size though. We also had three-​pepper chicken — crispy, moist, flavorful and spicy.
The scallion pancake with beef was slightly dry on the beef. But the dish was still devoured nonetheless.
They also gave us a free fermented rice with small rice ball soup-​good blend of sweetness and acidity.
The only real complaint is having the table cleared too quickly when there aren’t people lined up at the door– when that happens, the patrons may feel rushed to leave.
Service was great. My 2yr old toddler even high-​fived one of the waiters because they made her feel comfortable. The owner was extremely nice too.
This place is definitely on our restaurant rotation:)

Yum!
My family has a salt-​tolerance issue. We don’t use much salt when we cook our own food so it can be a bit much for us when we dine out. However, this place salted the food to our liking, which was wonderful, as this rarely happens with Chinese takeout.
We got the pea shoots with garlic, eggplant, crispy duck, and soup dumplings. The dumplings were decent enough. They weren’t the best I’ve had but since this location is just 5 minutes from my house, I can’t complain too much. The portions were generous and the prices were decent. I have a feeling this will be our new go-​to Chinese food spot.