1 hour ago, huiray said:
I took a look at the dinner menu (and also the lunch menu) of this place. I don't know the past or present reputation of this place, but just from the menu I would hesitate to order something like Mongolian Beef from what seems to be a Cantonese place that seems to specialize in Noodle dishes and rice-combination dishes. The tough kai-lan was a bummer and they should have done better, yes. The duck congee? Maybe that wasn't what they excelled at in their repertoire of congees? It's an unusual item for dinner in (again) a Cantonese restaurant, anyway... for lunch or breakfast, more likely - maybe they served the dregs of it augmented with fresh (under-prepared) congee? But also, Cantonese taste profiles are much more muted than, say, Szechuanese or Hunanese - is that a factor? Just wondering.
Many Chinese restaurants have a certain "skew" towards some dishes being excellent - due to the particular abilities and proclivities of the chefs, whether or not it is a famed restaurant or a hole-in-the-wall place. Many menu items are there because of "expectations" but they may not be what the chef is good at. Yes, even at the best places.
But when all is said and done, maybe this place is simply no longer what it was before if it was good to start with.
The Mongolian beef wasn't my order, that was what B wanted.
If you read the review, Bauer says that the chicken jook had an intense flavor. I wasn't in the mood for chicken, so I tried the duck jook. I'm also Chinese (family is from Fujian and some relatives are from Canton), so I know what to expect when it comes to jook. I found myself dosing it liberally with the pot of chili paste they had on the side. ETA @huiray -- I expected there to be some level of flavor. You know, like if the cook seasoned the jook with ginger or with white pepper or whatever. After all, jook is just rice porridge with toppings; it's the liquid the rice is cooked in that contributes part of the flavor. What I received was just not very exciting as far as congee/jook goes. One other thing that I almost forgot. The waitress asked me if I wanted a fried doughnut to go along with the jook. I said yes, of course. Well, when the order arrived, the doughnut didn't come. On second thought, maybe it was good that they forgot the order because we realized we ordered too much at that point.
And since you bring up the point that they're a Cantonese restaurant, very little of what was available was what I would expect from a Cantonese restaurant. No steamed fish with scallion and ginger, no seafood or roast meats other than the rice plates, hardly any food along the lines of what you usually post. Most of it, since you saw the menu, was fried rice, noodle dishes and Americanized renditions like sweet and sour pork and beef with broccoli. A touch disappointing, but whatever. Maybe I should have gotten the pork jook with preserved egg, but something tells me that if the duck jook failed, the pork with preserved egg wouldn't have been good either. Call it a hunch. Or maybe we ordered wrong.
We only went because I had heard so much about it, and also because it's #13 on Eater's list of places to eat in SF's Chinatown. For what reason it's #13, I have no idea. It was worse than the most forgettable Chinese takeout I've had in this country.
