East Ocean Chinese & Seafood – Albuquerque, New Mexico

In 2022, Freddie Wong posted a TikTok video that went viral on several social media platforms. In the video, Wong, purports to find the most “authentic” Chinese food by utilizing restaurant review website Yelp in a unique way.  “The easiest way to find authentic Chinese food, assuming you’re living in a major metropolitan area, is to go on Yelp and to look for restaurants with three-and-a-half stars,” declared Wong in his TikTok video, which garnered an astonishing 7.2 million views in only two days. “Exactly three and a half, not three, not four. Three-and-a-half stars is a sweet spot for authentic Chinese food.”

Again, the assumption is based on living in a major metropolitan area where there are a preponderance of “authentic” Chinese restaurants.  In cities such as Albuquerque, few restaurants even offer a traditional Chinese menu (if you ask for it).  Among those is East Ocean which coincidentally or not is rated  exactly three-and-a-half stars on Yelp.  A Duke City mainstay for more than thirty years, East Ocean has a huge following that includes  George Thorning, my friend and colleague at the University of New Mexico.   Though he did experience a bit of consternation when the restaurant changed ownership a few years ago, he still frequents the Carlisle restaurant.   He’s not the only one who loves East Ocean.  It’s been rated one of Albuquerque’s ten best Chinese restaurants by several online sources.

“Authentic”or worse “real Chinese” are  loaded words.  They are discrimatory and unrealistic.  To some extent, that’s also true of the term “tradition.”  Those terms imply that Chinese food has to conform to a set of standard dishes and flavors determined at an arbitrary time and place (e.g., China).  There’s no latitude given foods that evolve over time or the introduction of new ingredients.  Chinese foods invented in America are often belittled (expecially by pretentious critics) as not being authentically Chinese even though they may have been invented by Chinese immigrants.  For some of us who long ago tired of sweet and sour sauced everything, “traditional” Chinese foods offer a welcome difference.

East Ocean does have a “traditional” Chinese menu.  It lists 24 items, some of which you’ll never find at Panda Express or at most Duke City Chinese restaurants .  Examples are fish stomach soup, ginger onion crab and salted fish fried rice.  If nothing on this traditional Chinese menu strikes your fancy, the large menu lists other categories: appetizers, soup, noodles, egg foo young, fried rice, chicken and duck, beef, pork, vegetables, seafood, sizzling platters, combination dinner, house/happy dinners, lunchon menu.

You’ve undoubtedly been sitting in a Chinese restaurant when a server rushes past you carrying a “sizzling” dish?   Enticing aromas emanate from the hot food and sauce as they hiss and spit, creating a smoke trail that draws the rapt attention of all guests.   The secret to sizzling foods is that you cook the foods separately on a heated skillet on a gas flame than add the ingredients and sauces at the last minute.  It’s the reason the server is hurrying – to get it to the table before the sizzling stops.  East Ocean offers eight sizzling dishes, everything from sizzling chicken to sizzling garlic with seafood.

31 March 2024: Rather than one of the appetizers, my Kim and I ordered sizzling orange sauce spare ribs.Though we’ve had orange chicken and orange pork a plenty, sizzling orange sauce spare ribs is something neither or us had ever experienced.  The orange sauce is very much like the orange sauce with which we’re familiar, but the spare ribs have a lot more umami than pork or chicken.  In essence, the spare ribs had a meatiness that counterbalanced the sweetness of the orange sauce.  Most of the spare ribs are boneless, but where we did find bones it was easy to eat around them.  This was an excellent starter.

31 March 2024: My Kim isn’t quite as adventurous as her gastronomic husband, but she does draw the limit at sweet and sour dishes.  Among her favorites are pork lo mein sans vegetables.  She loves the tangle of Chinese egg noodles, a mountain of thin noodles with barbecue pork. A good smoke ring is as prominent in Chinese barbecue as it is in American barbecue.  It signifies the meats are prepared “low and slow”–slowly smoked in low heat to render those meats moist and tender (in the interest of full disclosure, the smoke ring in Chinese barbecue is often the result of food coloring).  Chinese barbecue (char siu) is actually very popular throughout Asia.  Instead of on a smoker, Chinese barbecue utilizes a technique in which strips of marinated meat on forked skewers are roasted in an oven or open fire.

31 March 2024: Not one to ever shy away from something I’ve never before ordered, I eschewed the multi-page menu to zero in on a new item on the “traditional” menu.  Beef hot pot sounds innocuous enough, but my description might just tell you why others shy away from “traditional” Chinese items.  The beef hot pot lists only two items: Napa cabbage and scallions and the “beef” includes as much fat as beef.  If you have an aversion to the texture or flavor of beef fat, you’re not likely to enjoy this dish.  A wonderful five spice powder-based sauce gives the beef a fabulous flavor and enticing aroma, but the fat did me in after half a plateful.

25 May 2024:  Luncheon specials are available daily (Tuesday through Saturday) until 2PM.  Each luncheon special includes an entree, egg drop soup, steamed rice and an egg roll for an inflation-busting price.  Most of the luncheon specials are of the sweet-and-sour variety I tend to eschew.  They remind me of my nascent days enjoying Chinese food.  Back then Chinese buffets (for the inconceivable price of about five dollars) started the decline of my svelte figure.  I was like Templeton the Rat on Charlotte’s web enjoying the smorgasbord of carnival eats.

25 May 2024:  My Kim’s luncheon special started with egg drop soup (also known as egg flower soup), is a Chinese soup of wispy beaten eggs in chicken broth.   It’s seasoned with soy sauce, sesame oil, and white pepper, thickened with a cornstarch slurry, and (at some restaurants) garnished with chopped green onions.  East Ocean serves its egg drop soup with a small plate of crispy Chinese noodles. Fried in oil to a crispy golden brown, those crispy noodles reconstitute in the soup.  They’re a delightful addition to a soup that’s very nostalgic and comforting.

25 May 2024:   The entree in my Kim’s luncheon special was orange chicken, succulent chicken pieces with a crispy coating in a delicious sticky, tangy, orange sauce.  Very reminiscent of buffet quality orange chicken, the orange chicken is (some might say) too heavily breaded.  Bite into each orange-golden nugget and there will be a little resistance before you reach the moist, delicious chicken.  The sauce is more sweet than it is citrusy though there are faint notes of the citrus fruit for which this dish is named.

25 May 2024: There are some words which not even Babelfish can translate.  Among them is the Chinese  term“wor.”  Some  sources simplify take it upon themselves to declare “wor” means “everything” in Chinese, but there really is no definitive source to confirm that.  The staff at Cantonese-based restaurants might tell you “wor” means “pot” or “wok.”  The truth is no one really knows.  What connosieurs of Chinese cuisine do know is that the term “wor” generally means you’re about to enjoy something delicious–something like wor wonton soup.

The Woks of Life describes wor wonton soup as “a wonton soup with lots of vegetables, sliced chicken, roast pork, and shrimp added, to make a full meal in one bowl.”  Study the photo below and you’ll quickly discern glistening and translucent onions, sliced zucchini, broccoli, mushrooms, carrots, seaweed and that’s just the vegetables.  Proteins include shrimp, char siu (Chinese barbecue) and  roast pork.  The broth is savory, rich and absolutely delicious, a slurp-worthy elixir served hot.  The dumplings are stuffed with wonderfully seasoned pork.  You can discern five-spice powder among the seasonings.  Even in summer, wor wonton soup makes for a great meal in one swimming pool-sized bowl.

30 April 2026: If you’re an aficionado of the fruits of the sea, you’ll be happy to see all the thirty seafood items on the menu.  Squid, shrimp, crab, lobster and scallops are prepared in a number of ways, all ostensibly delicious.  East Ocean may be three point five on Yelp’s book, but it’s a perfect ten for those of us who  love “traditional” Chinese food even if we don’t fully understand that concept.  Seafood is foundational to Chinese cuisine, particularly in coastal regions.  It’s been enjoyed for thousands of years and is considered a staple.  Moreover, seafood is believed to symbolize abundance and good fortune.  At Chinese restaurants specializing in seafood, you’ll find such diverse preparation methods as steaming, stir-frying and braising.

In China, as in several Asian nations, hot pot meals are more than sustenance.  Hot pot meals are an interactive experience among friends and family.  In this communal dining experience, guests cook raw meats, vegetables, noodles and seafood in a simmering broth placed on a table-top heater.  There are several hot pot restaurants in the Duke City where diners can indulge in this fun and delicious practice.  East Ocean’s menu lists eight hot pot entrees in such options as beef, seafood, chicken saday tofu and salted fish tofu chicken.  Having experienced the beef hot pot, I wanted to try something different.  Seafood hot pot (shrimp, squid, scallops, tofu, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts and Napa cabbage) it was!  There was much more tofu on this dish than there was seafood, but tofu has the tendency to absorb adn inherit the flavors of sauces in which it is prepared.  The sauce is an umami-rich oyster sauce which lends a deep, savory and ever so slightly sweet flavor to the seafood.  Though the seafood is quite good, much more of it would have greatly enhanced this dish.

30 April 2026:  Our garden in Peñasco was replete with many of our staples: corn, beans, pumpkins, carrots, onions, strawberries and green peas.  A significant portion of what we grew was eaten off the vine long before my mom could prepare something even more delicious with our agrarian bounty.  That’s especially true of strawberries and peas.  Because the sweet, juicy strawberries left telltale evidence of our having devoured them before they could be made into jelly, we didn’t get away with our crime.  Green peas left no such evident.  We could enjoy their vibrant, crunchy texture and subtle sweetness off the vine without giving away our guilt.  We must have reasoned that by eating many (or most) of the green peas, my mom wouldn’t be able to cook them.  None of us liked cooked peas.

Memories of sweet deliciousness of green peas come flooding back when I espy snow peas on the menu at some Chinese restaurants.  Though menus usually refer to them as “Chinese pea pods,” that’s often a bit of a misnomer.  Pea pods are the shells containing small, undeveloped seeds.  Quite often, restaurants serve more mature peas which aren’t quite as sweet.  Such is the case with East Ocean’s scallops with snow peas.  Snow peas have the remarkable ability to remain crisp even after cooking.  This adds a delightfully fresh contrast to more tender items.  East Ocean’s chef certainly knows how to prepare and season scallops.  These small bay scallops add umami to a delicious dish which also contains baby corn and zucchini.

30 April 2026: Among the many things I love about my great friend and frequent dining companion Bill Resnik is our common adventurousness when visiting restaurants.  Bill had never previously visited East Ocean and was blown away by how comprehensive the menu is.  A Chinese restaurant may list a thousand items on a menu, but we dismiss roughly a third of them for being “Americanized.”  That is, dishes developed by 19th Century Chinese immigrants who catered to local tastes and available ingredients.  To a large extent, that means sweet, deep-fried and saucy dishes.  Among these Americanized dishes are orange chicken, chop suey, crab Rangoon and especially sweet-and-sour anything.  We would probably eat caterpillars before we order any dish preceded by “sweet-and-sour.”

Our tastes gravitate toward dishes with plenty of umami, piquancy or diversity.  One of our common favorites is pork with spicy garlic sauce.  This is a classic Sichuan dish which means lively flavors and rich, enticing aromas.  Those aromas wafted toward us as the dish was delivered to our table.  A large serving bowl was brimming with thinly shredded stir-fried pork, wood ear mushrooms, bamboo shoots and red and green peppers in a savory, spicy garlic sauce.  The garlic sauce includes garlic, ginger, scallions and chili bean paste.  This dish isn’t quite as piquant as other Sichuan dishes we both love, but it’s absolutely delicious, maybe my favorite of all the dishes I’ve had at East Ocean.

30 April 2026: Tom Parker Bowles (yes he’s Queen Camilla’s son), a British food writer and critic believes Cantonese cuisine is the very best China has to offer.  Considered one of the “eight great traditions of Chinese cuisine,” Cantonese style is characterized by its emphasis on freshness, mild flavors and such techniques as steaming, roasting and stir-frying.  Among the dishes for which Cantonese cuisine is renowned are Char Siu (sweet BBQ pork), white-cut chicken and dim sum (small, bite-sized dishes such as dumplings, buns and rolls).  Unlike Sichuan cuisine and its use of powerful sauces, Cantonese cuisine is more subtle in its use of such sauces as oyster sauce, soy sauce, hoisin and plum sauce.

Flounder with black bean sauce captures those flavors and techniques Bill appreciates so much about Cantonese cuisine.  Picture tender fish fillets, fermented black beans, fresh aromatics, red and green peppers and onions finished with sizzling hot oil.  Though Cantonese cuisine is marked by subtle sauces, that doesn’t mean those sauces don’t have personality.  Too much personality, however, can take away the flavors of the flounder.  East Ocean’s chefs don’t do that.  They let the mild flavors of the flounder come across very well.  The steamed flounder is light, delicate and flaky.  Steaming keeps the fillets moist and tender while providing healthful benefits.

Ease Ocean Chinese & Seafood has one of the most varied and comprehensive menus of any Chinese restaurant in the Duke City.  It’s particularly a stand-out for its seafood.

East Ocean Chinese & Seafood
3601 Carlisle Blvd., N.E.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
(505) 889-9315
Website | Facebook Page
LATEST VISIT:  30 April 2026
1st VISIT: 31 March 2024
# OF VISITS: 3
RATING:Excellent – High quality dining experience; very good to excellent food, attentive service, and a well-maintained atmosphere; worth a detour.
COST: $$-$$$
BEST BET: Sizzling Orange Sauce Spare Ribs, Pork Lo Mein, Beef Hot Pot, Wor Wonton Soup, Orange Chicken, Seafood Hot Pot, Flounder With Black Bean Sauce, Scallops With Snow Peas, Pork with Spicy Garlic Sauce
REVIEW #1284