What is Hao Hao Chinese Restaurant?
Hao Hao is the small Cantonese restaurant that Jade and Vincent Wong opened in January 2025 at 9210 E Via de Ventura, Suite 106, in a strip center on the northwest corner of Loop 101 and Via de Ventura, at the eastern edge of McCormick Ranch. The Wongs are the family behind Nee House, the Hong Kong-style restaurant on North Tatum Boulevard in Phoenix that food writers spent two decades recommending. They sold it in 2019 to retire, and Phoenix Magazine calls the retirement ill-fated. Six years later they were back, in Scottsdale.
The name means “well” or “properly” in Mandarin, and the restaurant lives up to it in a modest way. The room is small and modern, mostly tables for four, with families at lunch and dinner and a bound menu that runs long. The kitchen cooks three regional styles, Cantonese, Mandarin and Szechuan, alongside the Chinese American standards a strip-center restaurant on this side of the freeway cannot do without. The difference is that both halves are made with care. Phoenix New Times put it on its list of the Valley’s best Chinese food in 2025 for the sizzling black-pepper steak, poured tableside onto a cast-iron plate, and Phoenix Magazine’s Nikki Buchanan reviewed it that September and declared the orange chicken the best in the Valley.
The Cantonese dishes are the reason to drive here: Tong Gong chicken, boiled skin-on and chopped, with a clear ginger-scallion sauce; bone-in pork chop fried with salt, pepper, scallions and jalapeños; beef chow fun in soy and oyster sauce; and a dried scallop and crab meat fried rice with Chinese broccoli and egg white that regulars from the Nee House days order by reflex. Buchanan’s review ended with “Take that, Snotsdale,” a dig at the Snottsdale stereotype that fits a city where mom-and-pop international restaurants are scarce. In November 2025 the magazine put Hao Hao in its ten best new restaurants of the year.
Our verdict: this is the best Chinese cooking inside Scottsdale’s city limits, in a room with no interest in being anything but a neighborhood restaurant, and the prices are a relief.
Ordering at Hao Hao
Order the Cantonese page first. The published highlights from Phoenix Magazine’s review are Tong Gong chicken ($18), fried pork chop or deep-fried whole shrimp with salt and pepper ($19 to $20), beef chow fun ($19), honey walnut shrimp ($20) and dried scallop and crab meat fried rice ($20). The shrimp come heads-on; eat them whole. Add snow pea leaves stir-fried with garlic, which the critic called the epitome of grassy freshness, and a bowl of West Lake beef soup if there are four of you. Mouth by Southwest’s opening report listed a shaking filet mignon brochette ($22.99), served with a saucer of salt and pepper, bone-in Mandarin pork chops ($16.99) and deep-fried rock cod with corn sauce ($16.99).
Then the familiar dishes. The orange chicken ($18) is light, crisp, sweet and spicy at once, and it is the dish to order for anyone at the table who wanted Panda Express. The sizzling steak with bell peppers in cracked black pepper sauce arrives on a hot cast-iron plate and hisses for a full minute; it is the showpiece New Times recommended. Hot garlic chicken and sesame chicken are there too. The Szechuan and Mandarin sections are shorter than the Cantonese one and, by the critic’s account, done with the same aplomb.
Timing. Hours are Wednesday through Monday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and the restaurant is closed Tuesday; the opening-week reports said daily, so the Tuesday closure is a later change worth confirming before a drive. Lunch on a weekday is the quiet window. Dinner on Friday and Saturday fills the small room, and there are more tables for four than for two or six, so a party of six should expect to wait or to call ahead. We could not find a published phone number in the press, and the restaurant’s site is an online-ordering page, so plan on walking in.
Getting there. The center sits on the west side of Loop 101 at the Via de Ventura exit, with parking in the lot off Via de Ventura. It is five minutes from the McCormick Ranch lakes, ten from Talking Stick and close enough to the Pavilions that this is now the Chinese dinner for the east side of the city. The crowd is families and couples from the surrounding neighborhoods, with a steady share of people who used to drive to Tatum Boulevard for Nee House.
What to skip. Nothing on the Cantonese side has drawn a complaint we can find. Yelp reviewers, at about 4.3 stars, grumble occasionally about wait times on busy nights, which is a function of the room’s size. Takeout is the workaround; the sizzling plates do not travel, but the fried rice and the chow fun do.
The family that un-retired
Nee House opened at 13843 N Tatum Boulevard, in a north Phoenix strip mall, with live tanks of lobster, crab and fish at the back of the dining room and a menu in which seafood made up nearly half the dishes. For years it was the room Phoenix critics sent people to for Hong Kong-style cooking, and a New Times writer once called its chef one of the most technically skilled Chinese cooks in town. The press we found does not record the year it opened. It does record the sale: in 2019, Tripadvisor regulars began reporting new owners, and Phoenix Magazine later confirmed that Jade and Vincent Wong had sold “their beloved Nee House” to retire. Nee House continues on Tatum Boulevard under the buyers, which is why the two names should not be confused.
Retirement did not take. Mouth by Southwest reported on January 16, 2025, that “the former team behind Nee House” had opened Hao Hao on the corner of Loop 101 and Via de Ventura, and New Times’ Chinese-food guide said the family had “come out of retirement.” The timing was good. Scottsdale has had very few serious Chinese restaurants: China Lil’s and a handful of Cantonese rooms on Shea Boulevard carried the category for decades, and the 2020s brought high-design Asian restaurants to Fashion Square and Kierland rather than family kitchens. A Cantonese restaurant run by a family with a long record, in a strip center at the freeway, filled a gap the city had stopped noticing.
The press response was fast. New Times included Hao Hao in its 2025 roundup of the Valley’s best Chinese food. Buchanan’s Phoenix Magazine review of September 12, 2025, opened by noting that in Scottsdale “la-di-da restaurants abound, while culturally diverse mom-and-pops are pitifully scant,” and ended by saying Hao Hao was “properly the bomb” and its prices “quite reasonable.” Two months later the magazine ranked it among the ten best new restaurants of 2025, the only Chinese restaurant on the list, calling its Cantonese cooking the Valley’s No. 1 and its orange chicken the best anywhere. For a small room with no publicist, that is as much attention as a Scottsdale restaurant gets.
What the record does not say is almost everything about the Wongs themselves: where they trained, when Nee House began, who else cooks in the Hao Hao kitchen. The restaurant’s own site is an ordering page. We have reported what the press has and nothing more.
Honest assessment: Hao Hao is a neighborhood Chinese restaurant run by people who are very good at it, which in Scottsdale makes it rare. The room is small, the hours are limited, the Americanized dishes are better than they need to be, and the Cantonese dishes are the best in the city. It belongs on any list of what to eat in Scottsdale that is not simply a list of steakhouses, and it is the first Chinese restaurant in a generation that has made east Scottsdale a destination for the food rather than the opposite.