Ocean Jewel Seafood Restaurant Visited 2/5/2011 4 Forks

Ocean Jewel Seafood Restaurant  13330 39th Ave., Flushing, NY 11354

I am a bad Asian and didn't celebrate Chinese New Year properly.  So Dan and I decided we would make up for it with a meal in Flushing over the weekend.  I was originally thinking of having a whole fish type of meal but when we decided to go for lunch with our friends Prior and Jes, we switched gears and went for dim sum instead.  Whole fish is a bit aggressive first thing in the morning and dim sum is always a bit more fun with more people.  I had heard about Ocean Jewel from a friend of mine and when we got there it was the restaurant that I had seen the last time I was in Flushing and said I wanted to try. 

The one thing to note about this place is that it is CRAZY crowded on the weekend.  We probably waited 40 minutes for a table.  The inside of the place is your typical large Chinese banquet hall...it's huge with lots of tables and people screaming constantly.  The carts come around immediately and I was impressed at how fresh all the food was.  You could tell it came straight from the kitchen and hadn't been circulating around constantly (although some dishes did come around at some point).  We had a little bit of everything: shrimp balls, beef balls, shumai, shrimp crepes, sticky rice with chicken, pork buns, shrimp wrapped with bacon, turnip cake, sliced chicken and mushroom, a bunch of other types of dumplings and sesame balls.  There was a good variety of food, although after 30 minutes we were definitely seeing the same carts come around.  They didn't have the clams in black bean sauce that I like and the turnip cake was a bit overcooked.  The shrimp wrapped in bacon was also a bit dry but it's hard to not like anything wrapped in bacon.  All the food was very piping hot when it arrived to our table, which is great because I've definitely been to some places where the food is already cold when you get it.  The shrimp crepe was still my favorite but I really honestly enjoyed everything on the table. I do wish my mom was there to help kind of decipher what the other dishes were.  

The service was good for a Chinese place (they constantly took away our empty plates and re-filled our water whenever they were empty) and it was pretty clean.  The total bill for 10+ dishes was $74 without tip for 4 people.  The nice thing about this place is that they take credit card, which many Chinese places don't.   By the time we left at 2:45pm there was absolutely not wait and the place was 1/2 empty.  So I would say come super early (they open at 8AM on the weekends) or have a snack if you intend on coming from 10am-1:30pm or wait til after 2pm.