This is probably one of the most mis-leading 2.5 fork rated reviews I'll do mostly because even though I didn't have the best time there, I would totally come back and try it again. The low rating is a mixture of a bunch of things that just kept knocking the overall rating downwards.
Let's start from the beginning. It actually started with a 4.5 rating because they kindly let us sit down at a table without our whole party being present. At the time, Van, Anuja and I had agreed to meet at 6:30, so when the hostess seated us at 6:20 Van and I were confident that all of us would be seated by 6:30 and we told her as such. Unfortunately, Anuja got caught up at work (it happens) and was running late, so Van and I were sitting at the table for a good 30-40 mins before we showed up and the restaurant was totally getting full by this time. I totally get this is annoying for the restaurant because they could have turned it over to another party and we felt really really bad about it. So we decided to order some food while we waited. Van and I had heard that the Dan Dan noodles ($7.95) and the Wontons in chili oil ($6.95) were a must order, so we got those while we waited for Anuja. The wontons came out first and they were rated a 6 on the heat/spicy scale and maybe because it was my first bite, I thought the chili oil was way spicier than a 6. My mouth was on fire and it's the lingering, back of your mouth kind of tingle. The actual wontons were ok, my main problem was that you couldn't taste the filling at all - which I think is one of the most important parts of a wonton. All you could taste was the wonton skin. So that was kind of a bummer because there's nothing better than a nice plumb wonton full of pork and scallion. I moved on to the dan dan which was rated a 8 in spiciness. I think because my mouth was already numb from the chili oil, it didn't feel like much spicier than the wontons. But the noodles were great. It was a huge bowl of nice, cold, chewy noodles with bits of pork. For $7.95, I wish we had ordered another round of it.
Luckily, Anuja showed up right as we were getting our food, so we quickly ordered our next round of food to keep the table. We opted for the spicy crispy cucumber ($6.95), the pea shoot leaves with garlic ($12.95) and based on the recommendation of the hostess the salt and pepper shrimp ($19.95). I never thought I would say that the spicy crispy cucumber dish would be my favorite. It was just cut up slices of cucumber in a sweet delicious chili sauce. It was rated a 6 on the heat level, but it was more of a delicious sweet heat than a hit you in the face spiciness. It was just a really great refreshing dish. As for the pea shoot leaves, this dish was addictive. It's my favorite Chinese vegetable and it's hard to really get sautéed vegetables in tons of garlic wrong and they didn't here. Sadly, the main entree we got of the salt and pepper shrimp was not a winner for all 3 of us. We all thought it was super bland (granted it was rated a 1 on the heat level but that does NOT mean it should also be flavorless) and the batter was too thick on the shrimp. Also - the shrimp inside was a bit overcooked, so the whole thing was a pretty dry. It's such a shame because I've had this dish in many other Chinese restaurants and it's fantastic. The key is the salt and pepper seasoning and a very light batter on the shrimp. All I could taste here was pepper, no salt. We all ended up pouring the sweet chili oil from the cucumber dish on the shrimp to add flavor to it.
If I stopped the review here, it would have been a 3 fork review, but what pushed it down another half fork was that they gave us the bill before we were even done eating! We still a few pieces of shrimp left and some pea shoots and without even asking us if we were done, they put the check on the table. What? Then within 5 minutes they came over and picked up the bill but we hadn't paid yet. I mean I did feel bad about the fact that we sat down before we were all there but we tried to compensate by ordering as much as we could while we waiting. It's just left a bad taste in my mouth and made all of us feel like they were trying to get rid of us when we in fact were still eating. While I still had a better experience at Grand Sichuan, I'm not sure if we really ordered the right things here. So, against my better judgement, I would come back here to be proven wrong. Total bill: $24/pp with tax an tip
Photo Credit: Yelp
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