Great Hunan Restaurant

Went here on Mother’s Day with my family and the employees were so kind and helpful. The food came very fast and it was delicious. I have never had orange chicken as good as this before. The beef and broccoli was also very delicious and they had the most perfect chow mean. I highly recommend this place to anyone. I am definitely coming back.

It’s so sad that this restaurant is closing at the end of this month (Sept 2014). The owner decided to sell the business. I will truly miss the quality Chinese food I’ve had here for 7 years, but mostly the family that worked here & the always pleasant hostess Jennifer. I hope to still see you guys around town. TC

Always loved the Mongolian beef over rice. They get busy during lunch time so it’s best to order ahead for takeout.
Came here today and the wait was 30 minutes for takeout. The lady was nice enough to put my order through quicker as I was in a hurry and it is a 15 minute walk back to my office.
Much appreciated.

I love Great Hunan. They have the best spicy wontons. Sooo hot! So delicious! Take them home. Add yogurt because you’ll need something to cool things down. This stuff is amazing.

I must have walked past this place 100 times while going to Yan’s Kitchen and never gave it a second look. Apparently Yan’s doesn’t do lunch on Saturdays anymore so it was finally second look time.
What a pleasant surprise! Should have been coming here years ago. I only tried the Hunan Beef lunch but for $ 7-​ish it was an absolute gang of food and a nice blend of beef, tender cabbage, whatever the sauce is, green onions and just the right amount of red pepper — I really don’t like spicy food but this was the perfect amount for just a little flavor without irritating the mouth. So goddamn huge I actually was able to split it into lunch and dinner (dinner with a little pita chips, tzatziki and beer on the side for filler). Aside from the lunch specials the rest of the menu doesn’t seem to go over $ 10 for an entrée.
Will be back to check out more someday, in the meantime give the Hunan Anything a try, it holds up to the name

Clean well kept modern Chinese restaurant on the edge of San Francisco’s great Chinatown. Nothing extraordinary.
Atmosphere 75 It was clean
Service 75 What you might expect from a tourist restaurant
Food 75 Very very ordinary
Value 75 About right for Chinese cuisine
This eatery is a punt — its one of dozens of restaurants in the area and without special notice it is no better or no worse then any of the others. Its biggest attribute is that it is clean and up to date.

Probably best Chinese food I’ve ever had.
That was what I wrote the first time I visited Great Hunan, and I stand by that statement. Today I ordered something average: Beef and Broccoli. It reminded me why I liked the restaurant on my first visit. The food was cooked quickly (so quickly that I wondered if my food had been microwaved — but the beef didn’t have that chewy — just out of the microwave taste and feel), was VERY cheap, and their sauces had multiple dimensions of flavor without being overpowering, too spicy, or there being just way too much of it on the plate — some aspects I usually find at other Chinese restaurants. I highly reccommend Great Hunan!

This place has progressively gotten worse. Went under new management a few years back and lost a bit of touch. If you need to feed a bunch of people, a fried rice dish will feed an army. Otherwise I suggest you go to Brandy Ho’s (if you hate MSG) or House of Nan King (if you love MSG).

Really good for the price. The best of the items that we ordered was the chicken fried rice. We’ll definitely go back as good inexpensive chinese food is seemingly hard to find in the city.

I have been here twice, i can’t remember my first order, perhaps it didn’t leave an impression on me.
First of all, really well priced for a FiDi location. I love fried rice and very particular with how its prepared. This is probably one of the best fried rice i have had in SF. Here’s my caveat, i only tried the Hunan Fried Rice. And here’s why its so good. Unlike many other places, the rice can be overwhelming and drowns the overall flavor. I love spice! This dish packs a well balanced punch, it doesn’t make it unbearable but enough to keep you wanting more. My only issue is the amount of oil they put in. I ordered my to-​go and as i ate my way down to the bottom of the white box, i could see a puddle of orange/​red oil in the corner as i tilted the box, the rice in that corner was drowning in that oil. But that said, i will still return and probably ask them to put less oil.
If you are Asian or familiar with Asian cooking, you would understand me when i say that the rice captures the ‘breath of the wok’ … amazing!
The photos in the restaurant is really helpful to guide me with what i order.

The food here is great, the reason for only 3 stars is because of an incident we recently had. They catered a luncheon for my office and everyone raved about the food. Here is what we ordered:
Shrimp in black bean sauce
Szechwan chicken
Chicken chow men
Veggie fried rice
Sautéed broccoli
Sesame beef
egg rolls
Everyone gobbled up the food, my problem was the ladies who dropped off the ordered tipped themselves! I added tip but they gave themselves a $ 50 tip, which was not cool! In any case, they pissed me off for that but I may still go back for catering. It’s really good food at a great price!

Not crowded on Friday evenings.
We came here as a backup for Z&Y. A table of 5 was seated immediately. In fact we were only 1 of 3 customers… Don’t confuse this emptiness with bad quality food. The food was good, very decently priced. The décor is kind of ghetto though. I wouldn’t take anyone I was trying to initially impress here (you must ease into the Chinese culture)…Oh and jeopardy was playing.
We ordered pork chops, garlic beef, beef chow fun, a chicken dish I forgot, calamari. All really good. And also $ 3 beers. YAAAAAH!!!

My boss took us because he used to go here 15 years ago. He said it was just as he remembered it.
Good service, adequate food.

I come all the way from Oakland to eat here. Must say I been coming here since I was 5 years old love this place. Always get there Kao pau Shrimp the very best and Hunan chicken. Everything I must say you will like.

I appreciate the owner walking me through what dishes were and weren’t deep fried. I appreciate the owner warning me that the two dishes I ordered for us (shredded hunan pork and ginger chicken) were going to be really spicy. And I especially appreciate the $ 2 bottles of beer every day of the week.

Great Hunan is neither great nor all that Hunan judging from our $ 6 plate of Beef Chow Fun (see photo) since that’s really a Cantonese staple. But why quibble, especially with the series of beige touring buses that make an automatic pit-​stop in front of this restaurant? They unload plenty of Chinatown folk who look like they just gambled half their life savings away at an out-​of-​town casino. Don’t sit near the open front door because the fumes will make you cough like Camille.
The chow fun was OK, no more, no less. Jamie W. and I also ordered the $ 5.75 Hunan Shredded Pork and Celery, which definitely had celery chunks but pieces of cutlets rather than shreds of real pork (see photo). Again, just OK. Bringing up the rear — literally — were the $ 5.50 Dry Fried Green Beans, which were heavily salted to the point where I thought I was getting hypertension (see photo). They were almost inedible after a certain amount. Nothing else was all that memorable from the experience except I have to say the waitress was nice once you got her attention.
FOOD — 3 stars… barely…and I’d avoid those salty green beans
AMBIANCE — 2.5 stars… the gas fumes and idling bus engine didn’t make for a cozy experience
SERVICE — 3 stars… nice though infrequent as the crowds came in
TOTAL — 3 stars… my first pick is Hunan Homes, then Yan’s Kitchen… this one would be somewhere after that

Surprisingly, I really like this place. The people working here are really friendly, the portions are generous, and relatively inexpensive. If you’re into deep-​fried and sauced up chicken, this is the place to be! They use white meat and there’s actually more meat than batter, unlike other places. I also like their spicy wontons — it’s not the traditional kind that you would get in a Shanghainese restaurant. Instead, they’re a little panfried to have that added crispy skin.
Not a place I’d go out of my work for, but as a regular lunch spot, yes!
JONASAPPROVED!

Went here on recommendation of my boyfriend’s brother. We were visiting his brother for lunch and this was our place of communion. Seriously this place is super small, so it is hard to get a table during lunch rush. The trick is to leave work early and grab a table. The staff filled up our water glasses quite a bit, so I found that reassuring.
Now the food. Portions are huge! Prices are cheap! Food tastes yummy! We had left overs for 3 people, 4 dishes at $ 24 total. Can’t go wrong here so take that San Francisco. Oh and their bathroom is huge and clean… bonus.

The waitress was a little apathetic, but service was not bad by any means. It was just efficient and not seething with overt friendliness. I don’t mind curt service if it’s still good service.
My friend and I ordered tomato beef chow mein, Mongolian chicken, and vegetable fried rice. Excitingly huge portions of each arrived at our table in short order, along with two surprising servings of tasty hot and sour soup which came with it. I was craving Chinese and particularly hungry, so I dug in with abandon. My friend is a little more lightly appetited, so we ate roughly the expected amount of food two people eat. And we had leftovers sufficient for two more meals (one each)! This cost about $ 21 total (tax and tip included)…$ 10.50 for two generous meals of decent-​Quall-​ity Chinese food?! Good stuff. I will be back. And I’m taking pictures this time.

Update: been back twice in as many weeks.
What they serve is schlock.
Must be a new cook, seems everything is dumbed down, more touristy, more brown hoisin sauce in everything. The mushoo plate was bland and it looked that way too! it was not even steaming or hot temp wise.
The Vegetables Three (comprised of blanched baby bok choy, broccoli flourets and snap peas) was excellent. bit’s of garlic, and quickly cooked. Not oily at all.
But everything else was bland and boring: the plate of shrimp, sliced carrots, baby corn ears, snap peas was bland and boring. Nothing was greasy, just bland and boring. The won ton soup, which used to be a clear broth with bits of chicken and fresh tasting won tons is now served in a brownish broth with mediocre won tons. It was not nasty, it looked nasty. My tummy was not happy.
And both times we went, it was barely half full=lots of empty tables.
Cannot recommend this place.