Archive for the Asian Category

The lunar year begins Monday in the U.S., Sunday in China. This is the year of the ox. To celebrate, we made some Asian dishes.

For dessert, we made the Ina Garten apple tart. Not Asian, I know, but it was requested and it was tasty. This time around we used puff pastry dough.

The rice cooker was used for course #4: fried rice.

This rice, with green peas, chinese sausage, and aromatics, was pretty good. Alongside was course #3, 5-spice baby-back ribs.

A glaze with sesame oil and honey added depth to the aromatic flavors in 5-spice powder.

The first two courses were tasty too, from the David Chang brussels sprouts with fish sauce/mint dressing to the Lantern-inspired pork dumplings with applewood smoked bacon.

We all had different “favorites,” so I think the meal was a success.

Happy New Year!

Today, after reading about many positive experiences to David Chang’s recipe for brussels sprouts, I thought I’d give them a try.

The basic idea is to roast them until they turn brown, mix them with a Thai-inspired dressing, then punch them up one notch with flavored puffed rice for crunch. Mint, cilantro, spice, and sweetness… a great combination for a cute little vegetable.

On the side was a veggie fried rice, complete with egg, peas, and broccoli, flavored with ginger, garlic, and mushroom-flavored soy sauce.

Chinese in the know know (say that a few times, why don’t you?) that the better food nowadays is in other areas of Washington, D.C., not Chinatown. Rockville, Maryland, typically is cited as the best place for “authentic” and “excellent” Chinese cuisine.

Yet, somehow we ended up trying Szechuan Gallery Restaurant, which is, squarely, in Chinatown. They were offering dim sum selections.

The place is not big; the dining room is divided into a “front” and “back” area, each one holds about 8 tables. Dim sum items come and go as they are prepared in the kitchen, and pretty much represented typical fare: steamed buns (sweet and savory), turnip cake, scallion pancakes, shumai, the so-called “sho long bao” or soupy dumplings.

Service was friendly, but not terribly efficient. Not one of their dim sum offerings was stellar. Aside from soy sauce, no other condiments are offered.

A mixture of Chinese and white patrons filled the dining room. Perhaps their menu is more appealing; we waived the right to order off the menu, in search of the dim sum. Better luck next time.

I’ve been eating at the Full Kee restaurant off West Broad Street here in Richmond now for almost 8.5 years. I’d say I’ve been a loyal customer. I’ve reviewed it plenty, but I feel I have to share details of my last experience there.

See, the Full Kee holds you captive. The relationship has been a little love-hate over the years. You can ween yourself off of their dim sum specialties for so long, then you travel to a far more cosmopolitan city, and eat dim sum there. Whatever good or bad you have, the treats at Full Kee welcome you back. It’s “down home” dim sum, like you have come to appreciate it.

This time around the service took an all-time low. You see, if you go for dinner, service can be lackluster. You just don’t feel like people want you to come back. They probably recognize us, and know we’ll come back. They don’t have to win us over.

So, during a weekday lunch, service was painfully slow. We ordered dim sum items, as there was no cart service. While other tables got served, we kept drinking water and tea. We finally asked. “You ordered so many fried items, it takes longer.”

No, only two, and you can bring out that which gets steamed right away. Okay, I didn’t say that, but I was thinking it strongly.

Finally, the first items come out. Fried shrimp roll (egg roll). Yuck. It was stone cold. I waited for fried items, and it comes out cold? It’s chewy and nasty. Sorry, wouldn’t eat that.

As other items finally came out, the waitress became confused. She was offering our items to other tables. Then she pleaded with us to take a stuffed eggplant plate. “No thanks. Really. Just bring us what we ordered.”

“What was that, again?”

When we left, they did refund us two items that never came out. What a disappointment.

I hate to see places that have the potential to make good food go south with either bad management or bad service. I can’t say that I won’t go back, mind you, but too many more episodes like this, and I won’t have any choice.

We recently decided to try the new Japanese steakhouse west of Short Pump Mall, along Broad Street, adjacent to the new Ethan Allen furniture store.

They offer a more traditional dining area “for sushi” orders, and the larger part of their dining room is available for Teppan table dining. The fold-out fan style menus feature different proteins that can be ordered (steak, chicken, combinations of meat and seafood) that determine your dinner price. The cook comes out, fires-up the hot grill, and does a little fancy noisemaking and saucing to prepare the meal. You get fried rice, the protein, and some vegetables. It was all very typical, I have to say, nothing different from the other places in town that have been doing this already (Osaka, Kabuto, etc.).

The prices were unreasonably high. I paid $27 for my steak dinner, for supposedly “filet mignon.” The waitress repeated it like a French chef as she wrote it down, but what came out and got sizzled before my eyes was hardly “filet mignon.” It didn’t taste like filet mignon. The tableside dinners come with some type of soup (broth with 3 mushroom slices, wow!) and a bad-looking ginger-dressing salad (the lettuce was not iceberg, but was not good).

The meal was fine, I guess, but very pedestrian. Our total bill was $67.00 before tip, which included one sushi roll we ate as an appetizer. This was disappointing. The tuna on top had no flavor and looked to be an unnatural red color (neon, really). The roll was bathed in some sickly sweet sauce. Yuck. There’s nothing I can imagine more un-Japanese. Again, it appears this place is run by Chinese.

We won’t be back. A pack of girls out for a birthday dinner (probably in the 5th grade) had a great time behind us. If you want to impress the kids, this place will suffice. But for any type of fine or authentic dining, choose elsewhere.

All I heard on the way home was: “For that money, we could have eaten at Dd33!” Indeed.