What to Order at Nandao, the Monterey Park Chicken Rice Shop

Mains run $13 to $18 at the Garvey Avenue shop, where the Hainanese chicken rice arrives with broth and three sauces.

Mains run $13 to $18 at Nandao Rice & Noodle in Monterey Park, which makes a plate of poached chicken and rice a twenty-dollar lunch. The shop opened in May at the corner of Garvey and Garfield avenues. Jenn Harris, restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, reviewed it on September 10, 2026, and called its Hainanese chicken rice her favorite in town at the moment.

That matters most to whoever works within a few blocks of that intersection. Harris describes a small room where women in Chanel finish plates of chicken rice a table away from men in construction boots working through beef noodle bowls. A Taylor Swift album loops overhead, and photos of the restaurant's own food hang on the walls.

Here's what I'd order on twenty dollars: the Hainanese chicken rice, alone, no hedging. It comes with the poaching broth and a dish of three sauces — chunky ginger-scallion oil, dark soy, and a red one sharpened with chiles, ginger and vinegar. That's three condiments more than most $15 lunches give you.

The listing published with the review prices the menu in bands:

• Small plates: $6 to $12
• Mains: $13 to $18
• Sweets: $4.50 to $12

So a main plus one small plate lands somewhere between $19 and $30.

The menu is the part I'd have bet against. A kitchen advertising Singaporean cooking that also runs Taiwanese-style beef noodle soup and truffle French fries usually has one dish it loves and a lot of insurance around it.

The résumé argues the other way.

Harris reports that chef Wu Hai Feng ran several chicken rice restaurants in Singapore before cooking at Star Leaf, the high-end Southeast Asian restaurant in Pasadena. Owner JoJo Wu, who doesn't eat chicken, tried his version at a Star Leaf family meal two years ago, per the review, and eventually asked him to help open Nandao.

My read shifted on the beef noodle soup. One kitchen rarely gets both the poached chicken and a ten-hour braised beef bowl right, and Harris says so flatly in the review: "If someone slid into my DMs with such a claim, I'd call them a liar."

She makes this place the exception, and she goes further about the room: "This might be my favorite place in the entire San Gabriel Valley to have lunch right now."

The strongest objection is the honest one. That's one critic, on a restaurant four months old, in a corridor where chicken rice specialists have been opening for a decade in Hainanese, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Thai styles. The Times was already calling it a competition back in November 2024.

One review isn't a coronation. What tips it for me is that the specifics are checkable: a chef with Singapore chicken rice restaurants behind him, a price band under twenty, and two crossover dishes from the owner's Pasadena kitchen.

And no, $15 isn't the benchmark. The rice is. Harris spends as much of the review on the onion-studded grains as on the bird, which is the correct proportion — a cheap plate loses on limp rice, and an expensive one can't buy its way out of it.

Nandao Rice & Noodle is at 101 W. Garvey Ave., Ste. 111, Monterey Park, (626) 323-9888. It's open Wednesday through Monday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., closed Tuesdays, with street parking. If Wu's at the corner table folding wontons, order those too.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved September 12, 2026.