Ni Hao Chinese Cuisine

This Chinese restaurant recently opened in Spring near us (don't confuse it with NiHao Chinese on Memorial Drive in Houston--they are not related). We had a family dinner the other night.

This is an interesting and somewhat difficult place to review. The flavors and textures are not like any other Chinese place I have visited. There are many unique menu items. We didn't totally love everything but were very intrigued.

The menu has a lot of charming translation typos and non sequiturs. We started off with a cucumber salad and a Tornado Potato, and I got a Hand Punch Lemon Green Tea (I think that should be hand squeezed). Wacky Mongolian in this area serves a cucumber salad that is sweet--Ni Hao's is the savory version, spiced with curry. It was tasty and an interesting change. The Tornado Potato is a spiral-cut potato on a stick--we've had something like it at Bigotes Sports Bar and a few other places. The Ni Hao version is cut thicker and breaded. This makes it nice and crispy but very difficult to get off the stick and share. It was not seasoned, but comes with ketchup and you can also use soy sauce on it. The server said the tea had a lot of flavor, and she was absolutely right. There's lemonade, tea, ginger, limes and boba in there. I wish I'd been told about the boba, I don't particularly like it. But the tea was very good and I can recommend it.

For entrees we got beef curry fried noodles, rainbow vegetarian noodles, pan fried rice cakes with shrimp, and vegetable fried rice with egg. The beef curry fried noodles had a soft-fried texture. The curry flavor was present but very mild. Not a lot of beef but what there was was good.

The rainbow vegetarian noodles had a great presentation. The toppings--red peppers, finely chopped mushrooms, green vegetables, bamboo shoots, and one other item that I forget--are arranged in stripes across a bed of noodles with peanuts. You then mix them with tongs. The bowl was a bit shallow for the mixing and was piled past the top, but we managed. The dish is very peanut-forward, a unique flavor.

The pan fried rice cakes with shrimp conjure an image of a crisp rice cake with shrimp of some kind, but the dish is quite different. The rice cake is made from rice flour and is dense--it reminds me of mochi. It is sauteed together with the shrimp in a nice savory seafood sauce. The cakes are about 1/4 inch thick and somewhat chewy. The sauteed shrimp were done nicely. The dish is very filling, I didn't come close to finishing it.

The vegetable fried rice with egg was the closest thing to a classic dish that we got. The base dish is somewhat plain, but with soy sauce it was quite good and satisfying.

The restaurant is very pretty inside, an interesting mix of Asian and other cultural decor. They have a bright red phone booth reminiscent of London. The restaurant is bright, with white walls--no trouble seeing your food. They seem to be experimenting with self-placed orders in the restaurant--there's a kiosk that says "order here" at the entrance, and a QR code at the tables. We didn't try these out. Service was pleasant, I think the server was perhaps a co-owner. The restrooms (gendered but identical) were clean and ready. I think it's a place that will take more than one visit to form a final opinion. For now I'm rounding up to 4 stars.

My Yelp Review