As usual, it's always a good sign when the ethnic restaurant you want to try is full of people of that race. So when we walked into East Pearl, it was jammed packed with lots of Chinese people, so I knew it had to be at least decent. And as usual, I just sit back and let my mom ask a ton of questions and order for the table. The best way to eat food like this is with a huge group (4+ people), but since it was just the 3 of us, we had to dial it back a bit. We ordered the fried cod fish ($21.95), water spinach, clams in black bean sauce, and assorted meats, seafood and bean curd casserole ($14) - the reason I don't have the prices down for all of these dishes is because they aren't listed on their webpage - see what I mean by "off-menu"?. The fried cod fish was delicious. It was 2 large cod steaks lightly battered and fried like tempura and covered with a light soy sauce. Despite being fried, it didn't taste oily or unhealthy and the fish inside was nice and tender. I actually really love cod as it's one of the lighter non-fishy tasting fishes. Next came the "casserole" dish - I'm not sure why they call it a casserole except for the fact that it comes in a casserole like pot. The pot came with tons of scallops, squid, shrimp, mushrooms, and bean curd in a thick brown sauce. Yum. The one disappointment was that there was almost no meat in it. The type of Chinese food this place is known for is its BBQ meats and we were told that this dish would have BBQ'd pork in it. For this reason alone, we did not order a separate order of BBQ'd meats. But this casserole dish had literally 1 teeny tiny piece of pork in it. I mean, it looked like a scrap of meat that had fallen off the cutting board by accident. So that was a big bummer.
The water spinach was served with about 10 cloves are garlic and it was by far the largest bowl of veggies I've ever seen. You know how spinach usually shrinks to about 1/2 it's size when cooked? They must have used about 25 lbs of spinach here because the bowl that came out could have served 10 people. I kept eating the greens but felt like it wasn't making a dent at all. But you can never really go wrong with sauteed greens with garlic in a Chinese restaurant. The bummer of the meal was the clams in black bean sauce. This is a dish that I typically love love love. The problem with this dish was that the clams weren't all that plump and the black bean sauce was super salty and overwhelming.
As I sat there at dinner, I was noticing tons of other great looking dishes go past us, but it's just too damn hard to eat family style with less than 4 people. My mom and Mike did mention that they came a few weeks ago and the food was just eh, but that the restaurant was only a few months old. So it sounds like they are still getting their sea legs going, but I wouldn't hesitate to go back and give it another try, especially since it's about 5 minutes from my mom's place. Total bill: $68 with tax
Photo Credit: Yelp
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