China Garden - Sidewinder

This place is a disappointment.As usual the Estes Park tourist rip off like most of the restaurants in town. Very mediocre food at over the top prices. Fine for the tourist, I guess, but us residents get shafted like this all the time.Let me give you a run down on the food so you know where I’m coming from.We ordered 3 entrees, all chicken. One was orange chicken, one was sesame chicken both were the sweet and sour style fried chicken.All they did was change the sauce and use the same style of breaded chicken for both. You know the kind you would expect for sweet and sour chicken. Also the sauce they use is obviously the same sauce with either orange added or sesame seeds for the other.So basically chicken nuggets with a syrup sauce poured over it. The variation was not noticeable between the two entrees. The third entree was your basic lo-mein noodles with chicken.This is usually my litmus test for an American Chinese food restraunt. It was ok at best, the chicken was a little undercooked with a weird teriyaki flavor to it. The noodles selected for the dish was questionable. I would use a flat noodle but they went with a thick spaghetti style noodle. Of the three entrees, it was the better of the 3 but still not a good representative of the dish. Lastly the egg drop soup was weird, it had the same consistency of aloe vera gel. Almost like they used the same corn syrup sauce for the orange chicken and sesame seed sauce and most likely sweet sour sauce for this soup too. Man, charging nearly 20 dollars an entree for this kind of cost cutting and pushing it into the customers like we are not going to notice.Don’t expect the portions to be great at this price. You know since is take out only.Yikes!This is our home town Chinese restaurant yay!This wonderful meal set me back 67 bucks!If I’m going to overpay for chicken nuggets I’ll go to McDonalds, at least I know what I’m getting.

China garden is a staple for me in Estes park! Li is incredibly welcoming. Take out only which works great for me cause I’ll just take the food to rock cut brewery right next door and have a beer with my food. I absolutely love the panang curry!!!!

This take-out only food is delicious. I keep coming back over and over it is so good. My favorite is kung-pow chicken with hot and sour soup. Very yummy. Li provides very friendly service.

Came on Christmas for lunch and the reviews said it's takeout only and I was fine with that. Then I went on the website and said it was open for Christmas and I was happy about that. When I arrived at 1:40pm for the lunch that ends at 2:30pm I was told they are not doing the lunch special. So everything had to be sold separately. They didn't seem to actually care which was sad. As I was trying to find a new place I watched about 5 people walk in and out with no food in hand and drive away. It's sad when the bad reviews are accurate.

Great food, local family business. Definitely worth the price, everything was fresh and hot, and the basil-cheese wontons and dumplings were incredible. Definitely coming back! Take-out only currently as of 11/5/23.