Lucky Inn Chinese Cuisine – Eden Prairie, MN

I needed to escape for lunch to run some errands and I remembered this place was close. I thought I get in there quickly and back out to do my other stuff on my lunch break. It’s in a strip mall near work, so this helped my justification.

The inside is a standard strip mall layout, nothing fancy or flashy, but clean. The buffet was kind of an L-shape against one wall. I got a table and headed to the buffet. As I said before, I’m not really a buffet guy, but I was in a hurry and this way, I got to try some of everything. I heard the buffet was small, but I wasn’t prepared for how small it actually was. It’s really small. Which is weird because I didn’t seem to have room on my plate for everything.

I’m not sure how they packed so much food onto a tiny buffet, but they did. I had to heap things rather than try to keep them separate. Unfortunately, there are no name plates stating what the dishes are, so I was just piling all kinds of foods onto my plates. I’m still not sure what some of them were. But there were a lot of foods on sticks and a lot of fried foods. How can you go wrong with that?

The fried rice had bean sprouts and egg and onions in it, which is nice to see someone put effort into fried rice. All of the chicken dishes were really tasty. It’s odd, but the food tasted better than it looked. It looked kind of bland, like the broccoli was a tad wilty and the brown coloring of a lot of the food made it seem more depressing. But flavor-wise, it was much better than expected. Not great. In fact, there aren’t many Chinese restaurants I would rave about the flavor, but this place definitely tasted better than it looked.

I ate a handful of these bacon-wrapped mystery-meats which were good, but I still don’t know what kind of meat they were wrapped around. I had some deep fried egg thingy (probably egg foo yung) which was good, but the weird gravies (is there a plural for gravy?) were brown and chunky and as I said, weird. The meat on sticks was good – beef, I’m assuming. And the handful of fried things, which I may never know their origin, were also good.

I got completely stuffed here. I also heard some bizarre conversations, but none of them appropriate for re-telling. There was also a spa/salon next door that I watched TONS of people going into. Am I the only one that doesn’t get a mani/pedi/massage during my lunch break in Minnesota? Geesh.

I’ll go again, but not anytime soon. It was decent and close.

Top 5 things about Lucky Inn Chinese Cuisine
1. Bacon at a Chinese restaurant – genius!
2. Great selection of food for a tiny buffet
3. Effort into the fried rice
4. Lots of food on sticks
5. Really close to work

Bottom 5 things
1. Didn’t know what I was eating for at least half the meal
2. Tiny buffet
3. Buffet had REALLY bad flow issues
4. Cream cheese wonton had a super tiny amount of cream cheese in it
5. Weird gravy and sauces