The food is what counts, and the food is pretty darn good. The orange chicken ($7) is light, airy, and avoids cloying sweetness that you sometimes see in orange chicken. We found the flavor excellent, and it was the best value of the dishes we sampled, despite coming only with plain white rice. The pot stickers ($5) were billed as an appetizer, and indeed it was just three of them. There was nothing remarkable about it - you can find much the same thing in your supermarket. But there's one exception: the supermarket variety comes with a tasty sauce. Lotus Blossom experiments with its own sauce. It hints of sweet plum, but the flavor was not impressive. The amount that came with it in the little cup was also inadequate. The beef sandwich ($6.50) was actually two very small sandwich-pockets in sweet dough, and stuffed with tender Chinese BBQ beef. It tasted like the Chinese pastries called bao. We might have opted for the BBQ chicken leg, but it's served whole rather than in breast or chunk format. The beef noodle soup ($7) had some excellent flavor. The noodles were like Japanese udon, and then add fresh whole spinach leaves, tender onions, and beef (also tender and flavorful). This was a definite upscale from the previous menu - even the broth was tasty - but it was not a huge bowl of food. We did like the strawberry smoothie ($4), which seemed to be made with fresh fruit and exploded with sweetness.

The major problem at this restaurant is not flavor, which is adequate to quite good, but price. The amount of food that comes for each $7 entrée is not enough to fill anyone up. To fill up all the way, plan to order more than one entrée per person. That runs up the overall bill, which is a real shame since the previous version of this restaurant succeeded in both price and taste. Now it works only for taste.