Cathay House

Location: 825 Wooded Acres Drive, Waco, Texas 76710
776-1072

Hours:

Ability to Loiter During Lunch: 4/10
Quality Rating (scale of 1-10): 8/10
Value Rating (scale of 1-10): 8/10
Staff Rating (scale of 1-10): 4/10

Recommended Items: Sweet and sour chicken, cashew chicken, happy family

“Off the Menu” Items: Special orders are allowed, including making your plate a little more low-carb

Health Conscious Selection(s): Plenty of vegetable, and seafood or chicken options

Review:

Cathay House is the hands-down winner of top Asian cuisine in Waco, and also ranks very high in simple food value.

Located on Wooded Acres Drive, south of the Valley Mills and Wooded Acres intersection is a large, two-story dark wood and white-paint house, with a large parking lot out front. This parking lot will fill up.

Inside lies a friendly greeter, and fantastic ala carte dishes. There is no buffet here, and you will not miss it a bit.

No one likes to eat Asian more than I, and where else can you enjoy a large plate of freshly prepared ingredients, with rice (steamed or fried), eggroll, and soup (wonton, hot and spicy, or egg-drop), for $3.99-5.99? I recommend the cashew chicken, sweet and sour pork or chicken, or the mélange that is the “happy family” plate.

Don’t be bashful about asking for a plate of fried wonton skins, to enjoy by themselves, or with the table-served sweet and sour sauce or hot mustard. Perhaps it is culturally unacceptable to treat these fried treats like tortilla chips and dip into these sauces, but I advise you to risk the political implications and dip away!

The only down side of Cathay House is that it is so popular that it fills up early for lunch, and the ability to loiter after lunch is zero, although upon reflection, perhaps that merely speaks to its quality.