![]() ![]() These are probably the best candied nuts I’ve ever had, perfectly crisp and sweet from a coating so ethereal you aren’t even sure it exists. Chen made this dish famous in Taiwan, and honestly, the nuts are fantastic, which is more than I can say for the prawns (I don’t like sweet shrimp, but my friends were wild for them). One dish where you expect it is candied pecans with prawns, where prawns are lightly sauteed in a mustard-mayonnaise sauce and topped with the nuts. But in main dishes the sweetness begins to cloy. The lettuce leaves sit atop delicate rice pancakes, and you pick them up in the pancakes and eat them burrito-style. This may be the restaurant’s best dish: tiny bits of Chinese ham and steamed chicken mixed together with bamboo, black mushroom and string bean beans amazingly removed from their pods. He also uses lettuce creatively in gai soong, the minced appetizer served in a lettuce leaf. ![]() One small bowlful and you’ll remember it all week. This is a powerfully intense chicken broth with flaky slices of fresh rock cod, full of sesame and baby lettuce. It’s only tiny cubes of tofu in a shrimp broth with egg white and black mushroom, but the egg and mushroom have a truly velvety texture and the shrimp are as soft and sweet as a baby’s kiss.Īn off-menu soup that the chef plans to put on the menu very soon, yu pin gai tong, is nothing you’d want to call delicate. ![]() Seafood and tofu soup is one a lesser chef could never hope to reproduce. Soups are one medium in which the chef refuses to compromise, and consequently they are a highlight. The outsides are crisp, and the filling is properly dense. These aren’t the juiciest dumplings in the world, although they do have plenty of flavor. I did pause for the chef’s fried dumplings and had a mixed response. However, I didn’t taste many of the appetizers here, because they’re mostly of the egg roll and barbecue pork school. The balls are juicy, moist and almost entirely greaseless. This appetizer is simple enough, merely golden golf-ball-size portions of minced shrimp and leek, rolled in bread crumbs and deep-fried, but Chen’s execution is perfect. When he plays it straight, he is a true master.įried shrimp ball proves the point. This is a failing common to Chinese restaurants breaking new ground-based on the belief that non-Chinese like sugar in everything they eat.Ĭhef Chen shouldn’t try to second-guess his diners. But in its place, he sometimes gets a bit heavy-handed with the sugar. He avoids MSG, a novel practice he started way back when in Los Altos. ![]()
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