China Red is a relatively recent addition to the top-end of the dim sum scene in the San Gabriel Valley—which is, of course, the best, from top to bottom, in the United States. It opened less than two years ago and gained a strong reputation very strongly. And, unlike another recent opening, Shi Hai, it has managed to hold on to that reputation. We didn’t eat there on our last few trips because a) I am always a little leery about new, hyped places; b) it’s in Arcadia, which is on the far end of the San Gabriel Valley from our home base in Koreatown; and c) relatedly, it’s hard to justify driving out that far when Sea Harbour, Elite, Lunasia and King Hua are all so much closer. It’s for this reason that we didn’t end up eating dim sum on this trip with Sku and his family as originally planned (we ended up at a different place with them, on which more later)—he was loth to drive the extra 10-15 minutes to Arcadia. We, however, were already going to be in the SGV in the middle of the week, last week, and so decided to cut across to Arcadia and finally check China Red out. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Chinese Cuisine
Mei Long Village (Los Angeles, July 2015)
One of my very first Los Angeles meal reports on the blog was of a dinner at Shanghai #1 Seafood Village, a then relatively recently opened and somewhat snazzy restaurant. I noted there that the strong reviews it had received particularly made me want to eat there as there are no Shanghai restaurants in Minnesota. This is still true (as far as I know); but, of course, it is not true that Shanghai #1 was in any way a Shanghai cuisine innovator in the San Gabriel Valley. My report today is of a meal at one of the mainstays of the Shanghai scene in the area, the very far from snazzy Mei Long Village. Continue reading
Dim Sum at Lunasia (Los Angeles, Winter 2014/2015)
My very slow slow-motion survey of the major dim sum houses in the San Gabriel valley continues with this rather excessive meal at Lunasia—which was also eaten on our trip to Los Angeles in late December/early January.
Lunasia, depending on who you ask, is currently in the third or fourth position in the SGV’s dim sum hierarchy (Sea Harbour and Elite are uncontroversially above it and some would add King Hua as well). It is located in the same space in Alhambra that once housed Triumphal Palace, and like its predecessor (and the aforementioned contemporary luminaries) it offers dim sum not from carts but from an a la carte menu. When I first started eating dim sum in L.A (back in the mid-late 90s) the chaos of the carts was a large part of the attraction but the difference in quality between food that’s rolling around a large restaurant in carts and food coming straight from the kitchen to the table as it is ready is very hard to deny.
Chang’s Garden for Christmas Lunch (Los Angeles, Winter 2014/2015)
It has been exactly a month since we got back from Los Angeles but I still have a number of restaurant meal writeups coming from the trip. We ate in the San Gabriel Valley quite a bit less than we usually do—partly on account of a couple of plans that fell through, partly because the holiday season meant very tight opportunities to see some friends and family in other parts of greater LA, partly because we went down to San Diego for a few days. We did, however, go out for Chinese food on Christmas, as we usually try to do and, despite heading to the SGV, shockingly decided against dim sum, Sichuan and Hunan. We went instead to Chang’s Garden in Arcadia for the the milder food of Hangzhou and Shanghai.
Si Hai/Four Sea (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)
This is the penultimate food report from our recent Los Angeles trip. This meal slot was to have been occupied by a return to one of our old favourites, Chung King, but after the havoc wreaked on our system earlier in the week by lunches at two Thai restaurants, Chengdu Taste and Hunan Mao (not to mention leftovers at night) we decided to go for something milder. And so we washed up at the San Gabriel outpost of Four Sea/Si Hai for Taiwanese breakfast (the original is in Hacienda Heights).
(By the way, I’d noted in my review of Chung King last year that they didn’t seem to have a lot of business at weekday lunch and had speculated that they must be doing much better at dinner and on weekends, given the high rate of turnover in the SGV for places that aren’t popular. For what it’s worth as we drove by Chung King on the way to Si Hai at noon on a Saturday there didn’t appear to be any more action there (no one outside, not many cars in the adjoining parking). Can anyone who’s been recently comment?)
Hunan Mao (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)
When we got to Los Angeles last summer Hunan Mao was all the rage. On account of my aforementioned hype-phobia we skipped it and on Sku‘s recommendation got our Hunan fix at Hunan Style instead. And that was a very good meal. This year we decided to give Hunan Mao a go—after all how often do you get to eat at a restaurant named for a dictator whose policies killed tens of millions of people by starvation?
It’s a large, bright restaurant—and while it didn’t fill up (we were there for lunch on a Friday) they seemed to be doing steady business a year after all the hype. We were joined again by the same set of food forum friends who ate with us at Hunan Style, and had a good time eating and reminiscing about the days when food forum politics took up too much space in our lives, and getting some scuttlebutt from one member of the party who works in the food industry in LA. Continue reading
Chengdu Taste (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)
Chengdu Taste opened right before we got to Los Angeles last year and was immediately anointed the best Sichuan restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley (which is to say in the United States). We opted not to eat there last year on account of my general suspicion of hype. There were plenty of other places to eat excellent Sichuan at, we reasoned, and if it were still considered great a year later we’d eat there on our next trip. Well, the next trip is now and Chengdu Taste is still all the rage and so we decided to give it a go. Continue reading
Dim Sum at Sea Harbour (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)
Last year I reviewed our outings to Elite and King Hua, two of the most celebrated dim sum houses in the San Gabriel Valley (just outside L.A) but unaccountably failed to write up our meal at Sea Harbour, which is perhaps the most celebrated of them all. Well, we were there again within a few days of my arrival in L.A and here is a report on what was an excellent meal.
Sea Harbour, like Elite and King Hua, does not have carts—instead, you order from a menu and your dim sum is fresher and better for it. There were four adults and two small boys eating. This is what we got: Continue reading
Little Szechuan, West End
As I’ve noted before, Little Szechuan was the first restaurant in the Twin Cities to put Sichuan food front and center. The original location on University Avenue was ground central for the mini-Sichuan boom in the area, spawning not just its own branches in St. Louis Park and in Minneapolis but also launching Grand Szechuan, which came into existence in Bloomington when the original chef of Little Szechuan, Chef Luo, left with all the kitchen staff. Grand Szechuan too spawned its own branch in Plymouth but that has since shut down. Continue reading
Little Szechuan (Hot Pot), Saint Paul
Little Szechuan put Sichuan food in Minnesota on the map a little less than a decade ago. From the original location on University Avenue in Saint Paul they expanded first to the tony West End mall in St. Louis Park and then later to the university area in Minneapolis. By the time of their expansion, however, they were no longer the best Sichuan food in town. That torch had been taken by their original chef to his new restaurant Grand Szechuan in Bloomington—and he’s pretty much held it there since then. I’ve noted before that I’ve found the quality at Little Szechuan to be highly variable since Chef Luo left—and I’m not sure how much stability there has been in the kitchen. Continue reading
Szechuan Spice
We leave for Delhi on Sunday and have everything left to do. Therefore, it only made sense that on Wednesday we went up to the cities for lunch. It is true that we’d had the boys at home every day since Festivus, and thanks to the polar vortex, Governor Mark Dayton and the local school district that nightmarelovely time with our delightful progeny got extended by another two days this week. And so we needed to get out and do something. As Sichuan food is not something we’ll be eating much of in Delhi we decided to eat a Sichuan lunch and in a shocking twist decided to go somewhere other than Grand Szechuan. That somewhere is Szechuan Spice on Lyndale, right off of Lake Street in Minneapolis. It is one of the relatively newer Sichuan places in town and for whatever reason we’ve never been moved to go. Continue reading
Chung King (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
As I noted in my review of our meal at Yunkun Garden a month and a half ago, Chung King was for a very long time our go-to place in the SGV for Sichuan food. This was until we inexplicably switched our loyalties to Yunkun Garden a couple of years ago, since which time we hadn’t been back to Chung King. As I try to trace the timeline of this switch this I think it might coincide with our first trip to LA with both our boys, not too long after the second was born. I suspect that at that point the 20 minutes of total driving time saved by going to Yunkun Garden might have trumped nostalgic loyalty–especially as Yunkun Garden is as good as Chung King. Well, on this trip, with our boys hanging out at my mother-in-law’s daycare till 1.30 each weekday we had more flexibility, and so decided to return to Chung King. Fascinating stuff, I know. Continue reading
Noodle Soup and Dumplings (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
In the last decade or so, Shanghainese Xiao Long Bao, known in English as “soup dumplings” (though that’s not the translation), and usually found on menus as “juicy dumplings”, have become rather popular among American foodies. In Los Angeles the restaurant that was and is at the center of this cult is Din Tai Fung in Arcadia. This branch of a renowned Taiwanese dumpling house (which now has franchises all over Asia) opened in 2000 (or thereabouts) and came to mainstream attention via a LA Times article in 2002. Since then it has been showing up consistently on seemingly everyone’s “Best of LA” lists (including at #44 on Jonathan Gold’s recent list of the 101 best restaurants in LA). Continue reading
Hunan Style (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
I’ve been in Los Angeles for a little more than a week now (after a two-week jaunt in late June/early July) and will be here for another week or so. As always, one of the highlights of this LA trip has been the food, and you can expect a few more posts reviewing some of our meals. If all you’re interested in reading here is whisky reviews now is the time to click on the “back” button on your browser.
Minnesota has zero Hunan restaurants; the San Gabriel Valley has many. Hunan Mao seems to be all the rage these days but Sku–of Sku’s Recent Eats–recommended Hunan Style in San Gabriel as his current favourite for Hunan food and so it was thither that we repaired for our fix of non-Sichuan but lethal Chinese food. We were accompanied by two friends from my old food forum days and so managed to do a fair amount of damage. Continue reading
Dim Sum at King Hua (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
This report on a good but not great dim sum lunch at King Hua in Alhambra is the last of my meal reports from my recent two-week trip to Los Angeles. The family are still all there, and I will be going back for another two weeks in August, after which we will all return to Minnesota together. Doubtless, there will be more pictures of meals from that trip as well, but after this post it will be back to a steady diet of whisky reviews for a month. And a steady mostly vegetarian diet for me at home as I try to recover from a fortnight of reckless eating (I’ve been back a week and doing a pretty good job of sticking to it). Continue reading
Yunkun Garden (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
The Twin Cities area, as I noted in my first entry in this “Gluttony in Los Angeles” series, has acceptable Sichuan food. The first major restaurant was Little Szechuan in St. Paul. This was followed by Grand Szechuan in Bloomington–opened by the erstwhile chef of Little Szechuan who apparently decamped with the entire kitchen. After this defection, Little Szechuan fell into decline for a while, and then recovered with a new chef who installed a number of new dishes on the menu. I believe he left too–or at least this is my explanation for the decline that followed again, and from which they have not yet recovered. Grand Szechuan, however, continues to be quite good (there are a number of newer places too, but we have not visited them). Continue reading
Shanghai #1 Seafood Village (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
After dim sum at Elite on Saturday we returned to the San Gabriel Valley for dinner on Sunday, this time to Shanghai #1 Seafood Village in Alhambra. This is a relatively recently opened place that has received very strong reviews and as we don’t have any Shanghainese restaurants in Minnesota (that I know of, at any rate) we wanted to try it. It sits in the same location as a previous Shanghainese restaurant, Green Village (though significantly expanded and refurbished) in the huge strip mall at 250 W. Valley Blvd.
The restaurant, which is divided into a number of dining rooms seems very elegant and luxurious as you enter, with lots of dark panelling and red and green satin. But as you sit down in a bright dining room it all begins to look somewhat tacky. This kind of decor in a fusion restaurant aimed at non-Chinese diners would doubtless be described as kitschy and attract derision, but in this context some of the reviewers have seen fit to describe it as an elegant throwback to the aesthetic of 1930s Shanghai restaurants and clubs. Well, whatever. Continue reading