Gary Chu's is in Fifth Street Downtown; it has been there, with the same quality and value, for all the years I have been eating in Santa Rosa (5?). It is probably best described as "haut Cantonese" style Chinese food.
The decor is clean and modern and salubrious. There is a salt water fish tank just inside the front door, reminiscent of the tanks of future dinners so beloved of the Chinese, but this time for atmosphere. The tables include a number of large round tables, as in many a traditional Chinese restaurant. The service is crisp and polite. They provide chopsticks, which is our preferred utensil in Chinese restaurants.
The menu offers a number of exciting dishes: Gary Chu is famous for his imaginative and innovative additions in the Chinese style. We had scallops with ginger that turned out to be stir-fried with a variety of fruits, including delicious almost-ripe peach slices. We also had Orange-peel beef, a dish I can remember having there several years ago when my colleague Mohamed first took me there. We had a DeLoach white zinfandel from the good selection on Gary's wine list, and this went well, especially with the hot dishes which included Szechuan (spelling?) wontons and a chilli-ginger chicken. (White Zin is not usually regarded as the best of wine varieties, but we could not let Glenn go home without trying some.) We also had some superb deep-fried, stuffed mushrooms as one of the appetisers.
If any complaint is to be registered about this place, it is that the food is heavy on the protein. We perhaps should have ordered some plain vegetables to break up the intensity of the barrage of good food.
All this comes for a very reasonable price: the bill came to comfortably less than US$100 for the four of us all up. This is an 8 out of 10 restaurant on an international scale, and we are glad that it is near where we live! I wonder if they do Dim Sum (known as Yum Cha in Aus)?