East Ocean Seafood Restaurant

We held our wedding reception here, and HKEO was so wonderful! We took up a little more than half of the main dining room (with the beautiful bay view!). Michael Xie and his staff were very responsive via email and phone calls. He arranged for red tablecloths and napkins, custom table numbers, a head table, extra tables for the cake and guest sign-in, and a private dressing room upstairs that we used for outfit changes.

We looked over their many banquet menus and were able to create our own custom menu, drawing on items from different menus. We also had one vegetarian table. Michael was so accommodating and receptive to our ideas.

The actual food was amazing. My only regret is not sitting down to enjoy my food, but I was too busy being a bride. :)

The location for East Ocean can't be beat. It's right next to the bay and offers really great views, especially at sunset. The food was good; I received a lot of positive comments from our guests. The manager, Michael, was responsive to questions I had before the wedding and accommodated changes that we needed to make in the days leading up to the wedding. My only gripe was that there was at least one other wedding happening at the same time as ours and we heard from our wedding coordinator that the restaurant wanted to hold our service until the wedding next door was served all their courses. Between the first and second course, there was a very long lag until our awesome coordinator was able to convince the restaurant that they were being ridiculous. All in all, I would pick East Ocean if I had to do it all over again. Although East Ocean is more expensive than many of the Chinese banquet venues in the Bay Area, if you want a nice atmosphere, good food, and attentive service, you'll find it there.

I"m surprise there are no reviews for this place yet. They are booked for weddings almost every weekend. So here goes....(long one)!!!

First we were going to go with Yank Sing, but the package we got at HKEO was waaaaaaay better!

The number one reason why we picked HKEO for our reception(other than our parent saying we have to have a chinese reception)...THE VIEW. Then the food, then the parking. On a clear day, this place has a perfect sunset view of the SF Bay. It's right next to the water in Emeryvile. I'd say this place has a better ambiance than Yank Sing. Not as big, but we fit 33 tables comfortably. They say they can fit 50, but I say not even. They even tried to call us and ask if another party of 10 tables can share the floor. We told them "HECK NO!!!". If we're paying them that much money, we're not sharing a floor!! So they put them upstairs.

The food is pricey. We actually didn't really like the menu they have for the tradition 10 course, so we created our own with what they had. They will work with you on that, which is Fab! You can add, take away, change any of the menus items. And because a lot of our guest our aren't use to "differnt" chinese food, we tried to keep it..normal for the american who arent use to "Sea Cucumber and Abalone".haha. They charge us on the menu. The cake cutting fee ($5/table compare to YS $3/person!), corkage fee of $20/table & we can bring as much alcohol/drinks as we wanted. Bartender fee $25/hr and you have to have two. Appetizer for $2 a piece (yeah, think $2 for one Siu Mai) and we had 600 pieces. The appetizer was just something extra we added to make our guest happy. It's usually not done at a chinese reception, b/c the first course is usually the appetizer. And the dance floor for $400. When you add everything up it equals a lada mula. My opinion, we got our moneys worth then we would at an american wedding reception hall. We had so much food, our guest brought food home!! The service was good. The head table got serve individually plated.

They give you for free red, white, pink, or sage green napkins. They have other colors, but that's extra ($2/napkin). The table cloth include white. You can get an Ivry one for extra. One great thing about HKEO for payment, they take credit card!! If you look around for other chinese restaurants, they want the form of pay in cash or cashier check, and no personal checks. Sorry, i don't have time to sit there and count money on my wedding day at the end of the night.

The parking is free and there's plenty of it. The only complaint i have was at the end of the night, we had all this alcohol left and they tried to keep it!! Either that or they were too lazy to pack up all the alcohol. I kept asking wheres the alcohol and they were like.."oh, it's mostly gone" Then when I asked "well, what's that"..."oh, that's yours." Then came back later "well, what's that"..."oh, that's yours too". WTH!!

All in all, we're glad we went with HKEO for our reception. I still have people telling me it's the best chinese food they have ever had.

Hong Kong East Ocean is popular and for good reason. The food is absolutely phenomenal, they're really accommodating, and the views are priceless. We booked a year in advance, and the day of our wedding, there were 4-5 other events but we did not notice any negative impact on their service. I was definitely concerned that we would have communication issues since I don't speak Chinese, but they understood everything I needed. The best part is the incredible value - the 12 amazing courses of food and free flowing wine (liquor and beer were available at the cash bar) came out to $8K. Other restaurants of much lesser quality were quoting at least that much for a simple chicken dinner! I have absolutely no regrets about this choice!

We used them for our Chinese wedding banquet reception. The food and atmosphere were decent. We asked for green napkins, but they used pink instead. The tables were crowded together, but was ok. The food came out quickly, but they started cleaning up while everyone was dancing (~10:30) and we were allowed to stay until 11pm. Overall not bad but not great.