Oriental Seafood Noodle House
One of Orange County's best Asian restaurants had an outdated name and consistently great food
Despite its outdated name and the inarguable fact that it was, by the end, not a great aesthetic fit for Heritage Plaza in Irvine, Oriental Seafood Noodle House was a special type of restaurant. And no Orange County restaurant obituary hits us as hard as this one.
During its prime in the early 2000s, Oriental Seafood Noodle House offered a largely Chinese menu with enough Vietnamese dishes and drinks to reveal that it was not, in fact, a then-typical Cantonese restaurant. It simply played one, complete with $9-$10 lunch specials, to attract crowds.
Like Sam Woo down the street, Oriental Seafood Noodle House had a nice (if homey and eventually outdated) dining room with white tablecloths, lazy susans on large tables to encourage sharing, and fortune cookies at the end of each meal. You could order a Peking duck, an excellent Wor Wonton or Sizzling Rice soup, or any of the typical Chinese specialties one might want: Kung Pao chicken or shrimp, Mongolian beef, or Mu Shu pork.
But that would be missing the point. The menu also included, quite prominently, Vietnamese dishes including “French-style” Loc-Lac shaken beef, assorted seafood with Mi Xao-style crispy egg noodles, and even Newport Special Crabs. Instead of relying on a long list of hot appetizers, this place offered only five, including egg rolls. Sweet vinegared jellyfish was the main draw in two of only five “cold dishes,” and consistently delicious, with Thai and Cambodian hot pots, Vietnamese-style hot and sour soups, and clay pots to explore.
As this was an seafood noodle house, the prices for seafood and/or noodle dishes made choosing them easy. Plates routinely arrived overflowing with sliced oceanic delicacies prepared with Chinese, Vietnamese, and occasionally Cambodian recipes, and if they weren’t the best in the area, they were really, really good, often great for the low prices.
Oriental Seafood Noodle House closed in late 2019, and was later replaced by Kei Concepts’ Sup Noodle Bar, a pho-focused concept with a good but tiny menu, industrial interior decor, and much less dining space. In some ways, it signaled the end of an era when family-owned Chinese/Vietnamese restaurants could find homes in Irvine plazas, even though customers continued to crave their cuisines – even moreso after the subsequent closures of Sam Woo, Ha Long, and others down the street. The owners held out hope that they might reopen again in the future, but to date, their plans remain unknown; consequently, the best local alternatives are now all in Little Saigon.
Stats
Price: $
Service: Table
Open Since: ~2000
Closed: Late 2019
Addresses
14370 Culver Dr.
Irvine, CA 92604