Kirbie's Cravings

Pearl Chinese Cuisine


Pearl Chinese Cuisine is the pretty sister restaurant to Emerald Restaurant. It is located in Rancho Bernardo and next to the beautiful Webb Lake Park, which has a very pretty duck pond that you can gaze at while you eat.

We went there for the first time a few days ago. I was amazed at how pretty the interior and exterior are.

Like Emerald, Pearl is currently offering a special menu where you can get 4 dishes for $24.99 or 7 dishes for $39.99. The dishes are different from the ones at Emerald. I didn’t have a chance to take a picture of the menu.

I had previously tried the special running at Emerald and while I liked the cheap prices, it was hard to find dishes we wanted to order because the special menu consists of a lot of odd entrees. You can view my visits here and here.

I thought the menu items on the special Pearl menu to be equally strange. We ended up ordering 7 dishes.

We were surprised to see how small the quantities were for each of the dishes. The quantity was a lot less than the quantity we got at Emerald.

We ordered a soup with shredded pork. The soup actually was enough to serve 8. It had egg drop and bits of meat. It was pretty good.

This is supposed to be shrimp with vegetables. It didn’t look very appetizing, especially with the frozen vegetables accompanying the shrimp. There were also pieces of pickled radish that were very salty.

This was a tofu with seafood sauce. The sauce had too much corn starch and I didn’t like the sweetness of it. The tofu was the only thing I liked about the dish.

Stir fried beans in XO sauce. The quantity was small but the beans were tasty.

Fish and tofu in a claypot. This was okay. There wasn’t that much fish, it was mostly tofu.

Spareribs. These were pretty tasty, unfortunately there were only six pieces on the plate.

Shanghai stir fried noodles.

Next time we come here, I think we will order from the regular menu. I did find the service to be pretty good and I loved the view of the park. But the special menu food was just okay and the quantities too small.

Pearl Chinese Cuisine
11666 Avena Pl
San Diego, CA 92128
(858) 487-3388

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6 comments on “Pearl Chinese Cuisine”

  1. The special menu prices are now $28.99 for 4 dishes and $46.99 for 7 dishes. I don’t know if the menu is different now, but I thought they had a good variety of dishes available. I haven’t been to dinner at Emerald for a long time, so it would be interesting to compare the two.

    • Thanks for the update on the prices. I think my biggest problem with Pearl was how small the quantity was compared to Emerald.

  2. Wow, the portions do look tiny for what you’d expect… It does look pretty outside though!

    Banquet option hunting? 😉

  3. Oh I thought I had a copy of their special menu somewhere around here but I can’t find it 🙁

    My sis and I (w/ her 2 little kids) come here alot. We also felt that their dishes (on the special menu) were really really small. My favorite item, so far, on that menu is the XO green beans. But it’s really such a small portion!

    One of the head waiters there told us about a Crab special – a whole live crab for $13.99 , prepared any way you like it. We went back a few times just for that dish. But now, sigh, the price has gone back up. But keep a look out for some of their seafood specials.

    Have you tried their peking duck? And did you notice that Mon-Fri , their dim sum prices are all one price (all items are priced as their ‘small’ plates) – something like that.

    Happy Fri!

    • Aw darn. Yeah I saw the dim sum prices. Emerald is offering the same deal. Pearl is a little out of the way for me, so I can only go on the weekends. Haven’t tried the peking duck yet.