Orient Express

Great for lunch, spotty for dinner. I generally get their Americanized chinese lunch specials — which are cheap, delivered terrifyingly quickly and are enormous platters of meat and rice (usually no vegetables). Take out is good and even faster — given the proximity to CMU, you can get take out lunch probably quicker than many places on campus.

I am very disappointed with the dishonesty of the restaurant. My friends and I went to the place the other day. The total price for each person is 7.3 ~ish. We give ~15% tip and authorized the payment of ~$ 9 from my card. However, my friend told me yesterday that his credit card was charged 11.34 instead of 9. I checked my credit card statement and found the same thing. I thought it was fraud but since it is only $ 2, I don’t want to waste much time on this. But I want everyone been to this place to be aware and I will never go to this place again.

BBQ pork over rice is good.
Based on the large portion, the price is quite reasonable.
I will certainly go back to this place.
12/​15/​2015 I went back there again. The young lady at the counter was very helpful.

This was another of the first restaurants I went to in Pittsburgh. Loved it! We actually already had dinner earlier and then went to a prescreening hosted at Carnegie Mellon. It got pretty late, dark, cold and we turned into hungry wolves.
I was excited to pop in here for my second dinner. I ordered some appetizers to split and the food and sauces were great. I think I got some fried wonton dish and crispy tofu but remembered it being just what we needed before turning in. I imagine the students frequenting this place on account of location and fast service. No complaints!

After living in Oakland a few years, this definitely became my go-​to place to eat out. It’s a bit pricier than some of the other cheap options for students, but it’s well worth it for the amount of food that you get. The staff is friendly, the place has a good amount of seating, and I haven’t found any other place that makes hot bubble tea – especially banana flavored. This place is the only reason I like bubble tea now. Their pineapple shrimp is also one of the best dishes I’ve ever eaten.

Sorry, but they committed a pretty big sin.
Called in an order of I think eggplant tofu with brown rice. «We don’t have brown rice,» the friendly person taking my order says, and so I get steamed rice. No problem.
Picked it up, it was ready quickly, friendly service in the restaurant, paid and left. Sat down to eat it a few minutes later. Healthy portions and quite delicious until… there was some meat in the entrée. I found a small piece, I picked it out, life goes on. It’s ok.
I was enjoying the rice, which came with some cooked vegetables mixed in (a nice innovation, I thought) but unfortunately in there were a whole lot more pieces of meat swimming around with the vegetables. Not being a carnivore, what started as a really good meal became pretty gross to me.
I was sad because I’d thought I’d found a new place to get lots of takeout.

Fast, cheap, and (most importantly) DELICIOUS Chinese cuisine. They offer a ton of dishes, and serve wonderfully varied flavors and styles of boba.

Foods come in great size. Great value. I usually get the lettuce fried rice with tofu. The staff is alright. The owner is very eager to make the customers happy. The water taste kinda bad for me (personal preference because I generally don’t like tap water)

Americanized Chinese food. OK price, OK quality, interesting staff here. Either totally empty or extremely crowded with Chinese graduate students. Here’s the good thing, it’s basically on campus for CMU students. So pretty convenient as an alternative to the God-​forsaken Asiana (a horrible CMU dining place).
I tried half of their menu. Hot pot is my favorite. Not the traditional Chinese family style hotpot but rather a pot of fishball-​veggie-​meat-​shrimp mixture. Caution: MSG. Fried rice is decent. All the signature Americanized Chinese food are made as they are supposed to be: a little Chinese appearance with the American taste. Bubble tea is really sweet, which I don’t mind as some of my friends from China.

I’ll eat here again since it is so close to CMU. I wouldn’t go out of my way to get here, though. I ordered via phone so I could go in and get out. Nope. They gave me chicken instead of tofu. I had to wait an extra 10 minutes (maybe not that long) but it was annoying since i called in so I could get the food and head back out.
The food was GREAT. It was very reasonably priced and the portion was large. I could get two servings out of it. They also did not go light on the vegetables – something other places don’t do! The veggies were fresh too, not that frozen, barely thawed stuff.

Three of my friends and I came here for a quick dinner in between studying and it was ok. As most people are saying, it’s pretty standard American Chinese food. We thought the Malaysian satay chicken dish we ordered would have more of a peanut sauce flavor, but it looked and tasted different from other Malaysian satay chicken dishes I’ve had before. Tasted ok though. The eggplant dish was good, as were the Singapore noodles. The price was reasonable, since the portions were pretty large and we were doing it family style.
I liked that the food came fairly quickly and it was close to CMU’s campus, so we could do a quick meal. I’d go back, but only if I was under a time crunch and needed somewhere close by and quick. It was great though that they had no problem splitting the check for us and we were all able to pay separately with credit cards.

The quality of the food here is declining rapidly. I used to order from here all the time, at least twice a week at one point. Now I barely go there and the food disappoints me 90% of the time. The fried rice I usually order is way too salty now and the General Tso’s Chicken is topped with watered down sauce and gray on the inside. Budget cuts maybe?

OVERPRICED TASTELESS CRAP
I ordered the Mongolia beef which was $ 11 for about 1 strip of beef a box of onions and some crappy white rice!
You have to be cray cray to go here!

The important part about coming here is to realize what this place is good for — a large quantity of food that’s quick and cheap and is great for those take-​out days when you the college student are overloaded with work and just don’t have time to deal with another place.
Keeping that in mind, I don’t worry about the service quality or authenticity of the food or anything like that. When I come here all I care is that I get my food quickly and that it tastes reasonably good. OE definitely has both of those qualities. Whether I order orange chicken or General Tso’s or lo mein or chow fun — the food always comes out quickly and always hits the spot.
As a bonus, it’s pretty close to CMU campus and definitely better than the Asian options there. If I were still a student, I would definitely keep coming back here for my Chinese take out!

Absolutely terrible food. The General Tso’s checken wasn’t chcken, and didn’t taste like the General had been anywhere near it. The Teriyaki chicken was cardboard. As other reviewers have mentioned, the food comes out in 5 minutes. However, other reviewers have glossed over the fact that FOOD SHOULD TAKE MORE THAN 5 MINUTES TO PREPARE. Please avoid this place as if your life depended on it… because it might.

Don’t go here if you want quick service, an attentive waitstaff, a «special» request like rice noodles instead of rice, or good food. Perfect for college kids.

OE. A staple of my college career. I recently came back during CMU Carnival, and it still has not changed. Service is still super quick, the restaurant is no-​frills but relatively clean, prices are still rock bottom and my favorite dishes were still exactly how I liked them. $ 6 lunch specials still? Seems like inflation didn’t really hit them too hard. Hard to beat this kind of value.
That said, you have to know what to order here. Some of their dishes are better than others. I usually go with the salt and pepper pork chop, Singapore mi fun, string beans, salt fish chicken fried rice, and beef noodle soup. Again, the food comes out super fast, so you have to wonder if they’re keeping it behind doors with heat lamps or something, but regardless, it doesn’t taste like it.
I would recommend against the bubble tea here, as the bubbles are a bit harder than most other bubble tea places around. Go to the Rose Tea Café across the street, or even Lulu’s for better bubble tea. Or just get the tea without the bubbles and you should be okay.
Quick, cheap, relatively high quality Chinese food at a convenient location? Look no further than OE.

About as average as you can get. It’s probably the closest Chinese place you can get to CMU or even Pitt otherwise. Good for takeout or even for groups. The food is okay … not particularly mind-​blowing but also not bad either. Standard Chinese fare … the Meal Specials are soft on most wallets.

Standard American Chinese food. Nothing in particular on the menu stands out to me, and I tend to avoid their greasy MSG-​filled food if I can, but credit has to be given to their service catered toward university students. Their food is okay once in a while, especially if you’re in a rush. That said, it is strange to me how nearly every time the meal is brought out within 10 minutes (5 if you’re taking it to go, especially the lunch specials). I try not to think about how much of the food has already been pre-​made in the kitchen.
For a sit-​down meal, the place is nice in that it usually is not too loud, and there are always available tables; the place is never overbooked. There is always at least one waiter around, so if you need anything they get to you pretty quickly.

Orient Express serves no nonsense affordable American Chinese food. The décor is pleasant and clean, and the prices are reasonable. The food is also quick and pretty good. Oh and they have really nice plastic takeout containers.
I really like the dumplings and the string beans with beef, and the hot pots are always pleasant surprises. A particularly standout attribute of Orient Express is that all the dishes seem to come with a lot of vegetables, which is uncommon amongst American Chinese restaurants and I think separates good from bad Chinese food.
While you’re not going to find the most «authentic» Chinese food at the Orient Express, the Americanized Chinese food they serve is pretty darn good. And if you can’t enjoy a good General Tso’s Chicken because it isn’t «authentic» — something is wrong with you (and maybe you can have an aneurism at the thought that General Tso’s has been exported back to the old country and is being served in Taiwan).
The owner, Peter, is a really good guy and isn’t above taking orders, cleaning tables, and is almost always at the restaurant. During my student days, sometimes we needed catering for student events, and Peter was always reasonable and willing to work within your budget.