Orient Garden opens in old Park City Diner in New Hyde Park
Shrimp with Chinese broccoli at Orient Garden in New Hyde Park. Credit: Newsday/Erica Marcus
Tommy Tang, owner of Orient Odyssey in Jericho, knew that he’d found his perfect second location when he came across the vacant Park City Diner in New Hyde Park. It had almost twice the capacity of Jericho’s 100 seats, plenty of parking and lots of potential customers.
In Jericho, Tang’s diners are evenly split between Americans looking for traditional Chinese American fare and native Chinese patrons who appreciate the authentic Cantonese menu and daily dim sum lunch. New Hyde Park, Tang noted, promised a similar customer base. “We are right in the middle of homes and offices and warehouses and a hospital [NYU Langone] that need a good Chinese American restaurant,” he said.
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Tommy Tang, owner of Orient Odyssey in Jericho, knew that he’d found his perfect second location when he came across the vacant Park City Diner in New Hyde Park. It had almost twice the capacity of Jericho’s 100 seats, plenty of parking and lots of potential customers.
In Jericho, Tang’s diners are evenly split between Americans looking for traditional Chinese American fare and native Chinese patrons who appreciate the authentic Cantonese menu and daily dim sum lunch. New Hyde Park, Tang noted, promised a similar customer base. “We are right in the middle of homes and offices and warehouses and a hospital [NYU Langone] that need a good Chinese American restaurant,” he said.
Tang left the bones of the old diner, which closed in 2020, but added contemporary light fixtures and lots of marble and granite. The vast dining room is split into two sections, one with tables set for four and the other accommodating nine round tables, each equipped with a lazy Susan, that can seat up to 10 people.
His chef is no stranger to vast dining rooms. Huang Ming previously worked at Royal Queen in Flushing, LN 1380 in Little Neck and Fortune Palace in Brooklyn. But the Guangzhou-born Plainview resident had grown weary of the commute and joined Tang in his mission to recreate a banquet-friendly Hong Kong-style venue on Long Island.
What Tang refers to as his “American menu” is identical to the one in Jericho: Hundreds of items including wonton and egg drop soup, egg rolls, spare ribs, egg foo young, chow mein, shrimp with lobster sauce, moo shu pork, Tangerine beef and General Tso’s chicken. The authentic Cantonese and dim sum menus have also been expanded.
New dim sum dishes include salted egg custard buns, cold chicken feet (in addition to the hot ones, of course), a dessert soup of mango and pomelo with sago-palm starch, and baked roast-pork buns (weekends only). All your favorite dumplings and dumpling adjacencies are here too: Pork shumai, crystal shrimp dumplings, pan-fried leek dumplings, turnip cake, steamed rice noodles and sticky rice in lotus leaves. Dim sum is served from carts every day from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The Cantonese menu features winter melon soup, sautéed snow pea leaves with garlic, crispy fried chicken with garlic, shrimp with Chinese broccoli, shredded pork with Chinese celery and casseroles of lamb and bean thread or preserved duck and taro. About half of it is devoted to seafood dishes such as salt-and-pepper shrimp, sliced conch and squid with scallions, sautéed lobster with salty egg yolk and steamed whole sea bass. The three-tiered fish tank displays lobster, shrimp and king and Dungeness crab.
Orient Garden, 101 Herricks Rd., New Hyde Park, 516-809-8216, orientgardenny.com. Open Sunday-Thursday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday-Saturday 11 a.m. to 9:15 p.m.