Tang's China House

Tang's China House is back in the family. Lillian Tang-Smith returned to run the Sarnia restaurant her parents built, took the dining room through a renovation, and reopened it for sit-down service — the current reason to walk in rather than only call ahead. The kitchen cooks Chinese and Canadian-Chinese, and it cooks for the whole table: a menu wide enough to carry chow mein, family dinners, and a separate takeout sheet for the nights an order leaves with someone in the car. Dine-in and takeout run on their own menus, a practical split for a place built to feed the table and the takeout bag in equal measure.

The clearest read on the current kitchen is Tang's Chow Mein, the plate the restaurant puts forward as its own — a Cantonese-style stir-fry of chicken, BBQ pork, shrimp and vegetables in a light sauce over pan-fried egg noodles, built to share. The starters carry more intent than a default egg-roll order: Chicken & Chive Fried Wontons stuffed with chives, scallions and chicken and served with a sweet chili mayo, Jar-Doo wings glossed in soy and ginger, and the standbys of Wonton Soup and Szechuan hot-and-sour. From there the mains run wide — Nam Yee Chicken in a Chinese miso sauce with green beans and napa, listed for dine-in only; Black Pepper Beef, sliced beef and onions in a spicy black-pepper sauce; Beef Broccoli and Mixed Mushrooms built on straw, shiitake and white mushrooms; and Pork Tiki Tiki, a Polynesian-leaning plate of diced vegetables, pineapple and almonds finished with crispy noodles.

What the menu says about the kitchen is that it never picked a single lane. Cantonese standards share the page with the full Canadian-Chinese canon — General Tao chicken, sweet-and-sour chicken balls, Almond Soo Guy under gravy and crushed almonds — and with a tiki streak that resurfaces in Shrimp Fiji, battered shrimp rings with lychees, pineapple, cherries and coconut beneath a lemon sauce. Vegetarians get real anchors rather than an afterthought: Buddha's Delight with tofu, wood ears, dried lily flowers and bamboo shoots, and tofu finished in curry or black bean. The rice and noodle dishes do the quiet work — Tang's Fried Rice folded with chicken, BBQ pork and shrimp, Beef Ho Fun over flat rice noodles — the orders that round out a table without competing for attention. The breadth is the point: enough range that a divided table sorts out its order without anyone settling, and enough dine-in-only cooking to make the reopened dining room worth choosing over the takeout call.

The family history is the spine under all of it. Garry and Diana Tang immigrated from China by way of Hong Kong and opened Tang's in 1970 as a thirty-seat diner on Cromwell Street. It stayed a family business across the decades, and when the next chapter arrived it arrived from inside the family — their daughter, Lillian Tang-Smith, came back to run the place, renovated the dining room, and reopened it. Local reporting in Sarnia followed the return, telling it the way the Tangs do: a restaurant handed forward, not sold off.

So the restaurant works two ways at once. The dining room is the destination — Nam Yee Chicken and the other sit-down features, family dinners like the 2A spread of spring rolls, BBQ pork, General Tao or lemon chicken, almond beef ding and fried rice, and a midweek Wine Wednesday that sets specially priced wine next to the chow mein. The takeout menu is the habit, the Friday-night call a Sarnia household makes without rereading its options, with a lone Friday lunch the only daytime service in an otherwise evening week. Both come out of the same Cromwell Street kitchen the Tangs opened more than half a century ago, now with the dining room lit and full again.