小花园 Yuan Jersey City

The food is so good!!!! Best Chinese restaurant in JC! The paper wrapped fish, the beef, the appetizers, all so yummy. The service is impeccable too. Both times we were there, they were so friendly and helpful, even when my friend brought a 2 year old! My friends fall in love with this place too. Please keep up the good food and service.

Giving this place a conditional 5 star as it is still a soft opening. I will be coming back to try more of their dishes. Soup dumplings were good. Chongqing boiled fish and chicken were also quite flavorful. All were a bit shy of great but better than others in the area for these dishes.

We discovered Yuan on a whim, just an Instagram reel. My fiance and I decided to try it out on a Tuesday night because the food looked so delicious and it was local. We were absolutely blown away with every dish, it was even better than we expected. We had the garlic-sauce whole fish, wontons in chili oil, fried rice, dry fried chicken, and pork-minced green beans. The staff were also very helpful with questions about the dishes and attentive. We loved it so much, we decided to come back Friday night for my birthday dinner lol. Be sure to make a reservation though, it looks like it gets booked quickly as there were only a few options left for Friday. When we came back, I believe it was the owner who recognized us and even remembered/wished me a happy birthday! We had another whole fish, the wontons and chicken in numbig oil. We ordered less because we could barely finish our meal last time - we were so full. Then, we were surprised with a birthday dessert before our check came! Truly such a welcoming, thoughtful place with excellent food. We will definitely be back soon! Thank you!

My new go to spot in Jersey City✨ we had a wonderful time here and picked some popular dishes like savory salty egg yolk tofu & shrimp, soup dumplings, stir-fried beef with asparagus, sautéed snow pea sprouts and stir fried cauliflower with smoky pork. We ended the night on a sweet note with caramel pudding and a refreshing lemon tart. Definitely recommend to stop by for lunch or dinner if you’re nearby by💕🥓🥢

If you follow Chinese food in the NY/NJ area, you know there's a growing plethora of super authentic, modern Beijing / Shanghai / Szechuan restaurants all offering beautiful settings and legit dishes. They're not here for you, Westerners. They're here for the affluent Chinese residents, many of whom are in the college-age bracket. So when you see a clientele of largely Mandarin-speaking 21yos, you can generally assume you've found one of these places. Sadly, while Yuan has the looks, it doesn't deliver on the cooks. We started with the lackluster Crispy Bell Fish, which made up for in bones what it should have had in seasoning. The Wonton in Chili Sauce was better, though the sauce was bizarrely soupy instead of oily. Their signature dish is the Stir-Fried Squid with Yellow Chives, and that was delicious--though the flavor profile is almost identical to Szechuan white fish and pickled vegetable soup (Suan Cai Yu)--just saucier and with squid instead of fish. The Bo-Bo Bok Choy was a decent veggie side, though it was made up entirely of yu choy, not bok choy. I don't know why they made the switch--it's not like the mostly Chinese clientele wouldn't be able to tell? Our biggest disappointment was the Szechuan Dry Fried Chicken. They used a strange overarching seasoning on the chicken--something akin to black bean--instead of just letting the breaded chicken cubes absorb the accompanying Szechuan peppers and garlic during the stir fry process. The result was a weird black bean-esque chicken dish that was neither spicy nor garlicky--which is exactly why people order La Zi Ji! So strange and so disappointing. Random addendum: Despite the name of the restaurant meaning "little garden", there isn't much in the way of greenery in the restaurant decor, save for a large raised planter at the front of the restaurant full of household plants. As nice as the planter is, it's sort of in the way, so I think their decorator would've been better off making use of the high ceilings to hang plants from instead. Just my $0.02 as a plant mama.