I regret to inform that till this past weekend it had somehow been almost five months since we’d last eaten at Grand Szechuan. I blame our summer travels and the fact that most of the friends we typically go there with were out of town when we got back. On the other hand, I am very happy to inform that is now only three days since our last meal at Grand Szechuan. We went back for lunch this Sunday with most of our aforementioned crew of Grand Szechuan regulars and did our usual excessive order. We got a mix of all-time favourites and dishes that we had not ordered in a while. Do I need to say that it was an excellent meal? Well, it was. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Chinese Food
Zao Bakery + Cafe (St. Paul, MN)
It’s been two months since my last Twin Cities restaurant report (of two lunches at two locations of El Super Taco) but here I am again. I have for you today a look at a restaurant we’ve been wanting to eat at for the last seven months: Zao Bakery + Cafe. They opened on University Ave. in St. Paul (where else?) just short of Dale last December and were rapturously received by the masses for their self-service offerings of Chinese buns and dumplings and other snacks as well as a limited offering of noodles, noodle soups and congees from the kitchen. These are all things we enjoy very much and hence our desire to eat there. Why it took so long, I can’t quite explain but we did finally get there last weekend. And I am glad to report that we were not disappointed in the slightest by it. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Dim Sum at Jade Dynasty (Minneapolis)
I’d promised a review of another lunch at Grand Szechuan for last week but never got around to posting it. I’ve been terribly busy at work with early preparations for the second run of my Bombay-Seoul off-campus program and just did not have the time to resize all the pictures (this is also why I did not post any more reports from Delhi in March last week). And when it came time to post this week’s Twin Cities restaurant report, I decided to hold off a second Grand Szechuan report in less than a month—I’ll combine that report with that of our next visit (which will doubtless be before the summer). Here instead is my first-ever report on a new’ish Chinese restaurant in Minneapolis: Jade Dynasty. Specifically, it is a report on their dim sum offerings. Long-time readers know—and some take really personally—that I am not very high on dim sum in the Twin Cities. Did Jade Dynasty change my mind? Read on to find out. Continue reading
Legendary Spice 3 (Minneapolis, MN)
You have been disconsolate, wondering if I would ever post a Twin Cities restaurant report this week. I apologize: it’s been a very hectic week and a half and I just did not have time to get it ready to post on schedule on Wednesday, or even yesterday. But dry your eyes, tell your emotional support team they can go home: here I am now with my third report on a meal at Legendary Spice, probably Minneapolis’ best Sichuan restaurant. Now, you’re probably wondering how this can be my third review of Legendary Spice when there’s only one other review with its name in the title. That’s because when they opened, it was under the name Lao Sze Chuan and I first reviewed it as such. After a year or so the ownership split and what was Lao Sze Chuan became Legendary Spice—though the menu did not change. Meanwhile, a new restaurant named Lao Sze Chuan opened not too far away. We have not yet been to that new incarnation of Lao Sze Chuan (which, I believe, has the same menu as Legendary Spice). At some point I’ll redress that oversight; here now is my report on our dinner at Legendary Spice this past weekend. Continue reading
Mian (Costa Mesa, CA)
Our first meal out on our trip to Southern California in June was at the location of Din Tai Fung in the fancy South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa. Our penultimate meal saw us return to almost the exact location for more casual Chinese food. We ate one floor down, literally right below Din Tai Fung, at Mian. A noodle/soup specialist, as you might expect from the name, Mian is a mini-chain spun off by the proprietors of Chengdu Taste several years ago. They now have eight locations in all: five in Southern California, one in Las Vegas, one in Houston and one in Honolulu. At all of them the menu is centered on noodle and noodle soup dishes along with a short list of Sichuan snacks. Portions are generous and prices are reasonable (though maybe they feel more so when eating at the South Coast Plaza). All in all, it makes for a good family meal without having to wait very long to be seated. Continue reading
Henry’s Cuisine (Los Angeles, June 2024)
Okay, let’s get back to California in June. I still have one more report to come from our trip within a trip to the Bay Area (when last seen, we’d eaten excellent dim sum at City View) but I’m going to scoot back down to the greater L.A metro, where we spent a few more days after driving back from the north. Our first meal out after our return was eaten with old friends at Henry’s Cuisine in Alhambra (in the San Gabriel Valley). We had actually been scheduled to eat dinner there with them before we left for the Bay Area but those plans had to be scrapped. I’m very glad we made it in after all for this was an excellent lunch. Here’s a quick look. Continue reading
606 (San Francisco, June 2024)
Our second full day in San Francisco was also a busy one but thankfully it began with the older boy completely recovered from the mild food poisoning he’d suffered the previous day. This had kept him out of our excellent dinner at Copra the previous night and had also meant he could not enjoy our dim sum lunch at Yank Sing—at the beginning of which is when the symptoms first hit him. And so he asked if we could eat some dumplings for lunch on this day as well. This worked well with our plans. We were due at the Rancho Gordo mothership in Napa in the afternoon but had been planning already to take the boys to Chinatown and City Lights in the morning. I cast around for well-reviewed purveyors of dumplings in the relative vicinity of City Lights and 606 was right there. It turned out to be a solid choice. Continue reading
Din Tai Fung (Costa Mesa, CA, June 2024)
I still have three food reports to come from Seoul in February/March and one more from New York in May. I’ll get those done by the end of the month. But I’m first going to sneak in the first report from our ongoing trip to California. First up is our first meal out, eaten at the start of last week. The boys had asked to eat soup dumplings/xiao long bao on this trip and so we decided to kick off our gorging at the Costa Mesa location of Din Tai Fung. This was the missus and my first visit to Din Tai Fung in more than 11 years and the first time with the boys in tow. That first visit was not to this branch, of course, which is much newer; it was to the Arcadia branch (I’m not sure if it is still extant). I reported on that meal in August 2013. I noted then that while the meal was fine, it was nothing out of the ordinary and not worth the hassle associated with eating at Din Tai Fung. What did we think of it this time around? Read on. Continue reading
Grand Szechuan, December 2023 (Bloomington, MN)
This is not the last restaurant report I’ll be posting this year—I still have one each to come later this week from Dublin and New York. It is, however, a report on our last restaurant meal in 2023. Fittingly, it was eaten at our family’s favourite restaurant in the Twin Cities metro: Grand Szechuan. We descended on them for lunch on Christmas with our most die-hard Grand Szechuan crew. There were eight of us and we did a fair bit of damage, with an order that was a mix of old favourites and some things we had not got in a while. It was an excellent meal and the perfect way to bid farewell to Twin Cities dining for a while. We’re going to be gone to Bombay and Seoul (and then Delhi) for a few months—there will be lots of excellent eating done in all those cities but we’ll miss Grand Szechuan anyway. Continue reading
Sichuan Chilli King (Dublin, Summer 2023)
Only two more restaurant reports to go from our stay in Dublin this summer, and they’re both from places we really enjoyed. The first is a place we ate at twice as a family, and I went back a third time as well with a group of students in tow: Sichuan Chilli King. I had little idea before arriving in Dublin as to what the non-Irish and European food scene would be like. If I’d been asked, I probably would have said that I had low expectations of Chinese food in the city. And our first Chinese outings—dim sum at Ka Shing and Good World—would have mostly borne those expectations out: they were decent meals but nothing more. I certainly was not expecting to find good Sichuan food and so we did not have our hopes up on our first visit to Sichuan Chilli King: we went mostly because it was the start of our third week in Dublin and we needed some heat! As you can guess from the fact that there was both a second and third visit, we in fact liked the food there very much. Herewith a brief report on all three meals. Continue reading
Kung Fu Hot Pot (Minneapolis)
On Friday I had to drive up to South Minneapolis to pick something up—okay, okay, it was three bottles of mezcal. As I was probably going to be up there close to lunch time I tried to figure out where I might grab a bite in the general vicinity. One of the first places I thought of was Szechuan Spice, the small Sichuan restaurant that we’ve quite enjoyed in the past. A few minutes later I discovered that they closed earlier this year—apparently, this was first said to be for renovation but they never re-opened. I was very sad to find this out as we’d liked a lot of things we’d eaten there. I was intrigued, however, to see that the space had been quickly filled with a hot pot restaurant named Kung Fu Hot Pot. As I noted Szechuan Spice’s closure in a comment on my most recent review of a meal there, I noted that I might check it out soon. Flash forward to three hours later, when the missus and I sat down at a table by the window. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Duck (Dublin, Summer 2023)
It’s been a while since my last restaurant report from our trip to Ireland in the summer. That most recent report was of a lunch centered on seafood, at King Sitric, in the coastal town of Howth, just about 30 minutes by train from Dublin. Here now is a meal eaten in Dublin proper, centered on Hong Kong-style barbecue or roast meats. Duck is located on Fade St. right by the George’s Street Arcade, and just around the corner from the excellent Asia Market—and not very far, for that matter, from either Good World or Ka Shing. It is a tiny operation. The room has seating for maybe 20 people, either around a larger communal table in the middle or at the narrow counter that rings the three walls around it. The fourth wall is taken up by the counter where you place your order and pick it up when it’s ready. It’s not a place to eat in at if you’re a large group—and even if you’re a group of four, your chances of getting seats together are higher if you show up right when they open at noon. After that they fill up quickly with solo diners on their lunch breaks. Not surprisingly, most of their business seems to be carry-away. The four of us did sit down. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Lanzhou Ramen (Milan, July 2023)
Four and a half months after our trip to Italy ended, I am finally almost done with my meal reports. The last leg of our stay was in Milan. We were there for two nights and a day, partly to see the Last Supper and partly to meet up with one of my oldest, dearest friends who lives an hour outside Milan. She and her husband drove over for dinner in the evening. That meal featured Italian food. For lunch, however, we ate our first non-Italian meal in three weeks. We hadn’t really planned this. We’d chosen our AirBnB on the basis of proximity to the train station and after arrival from Padua we didn’t have the energy to go very far for lunch or the appetite for anything very filling. Google indicated that we were in a neighbourhood that featured a number of Asian restaurants and we decided to go eat a light lunch of noodle soup and dumplings at a place called Lanzhou Ramen, about 7 minutes walk from our flat. We arrived to find a small but attractive restaurant. Here’s how the meal went. Continue reading
Grand Szechuan, June 2023 (Bloomington, MN)
We are out of Minnesota for most of the summer. Fittingly, the restaurant meal with which we bid goodbye to the Twin Cities metro was a dinner at Grand Szechuan with many members of our usual Grand Szechuan crew. I am very pleased to report that the restaurant is now all the way back from its staffing issues that lingered from late last year into the early part of this year. Yes, we had a very good meal there in late March (see here) but that had still featured the smaller, folded paper menus and there weren’t many familiar faces to be seen. At this meal we were once again presented with large, formal menus. Not everything that used to be on the pre-crisis menu is on it—no “Spicy, Hammered Chicken” for instance—but it is mostly comprehensive. And though we didn’t see Chef Luo at this meal either (though we were at an out-of-the-way table behind the check-in desk) we saw plenty of other faces we’ve known for a while. And, most importantly, it was a rather excellent meal. Here are the details. Continue reading
A&L Chinese: Dim Sum Again (Inver Grove Heights, MN)
Back in November I wrote up a very disappointing dim sum meal at Yangtze in St. Louis Park and ended by noting that I’d give A&L Chinese one more shot, and that if it turned out as bad as our meal at Yangtze I’d be done with dim sum in the Twin Cities metro. Accordingly, with a lot riding on it, I returned to A&L last weekend with most of the group of people who’ve been accompanying me to the Twin Cities meals I’ve recently reviewed. I’m glad to say that while the meal was nothing very special it was a lot better than the Yangtze debacle and that A&L Chinese remains the one passable option for dim sum in the area. Continue reading
Tea House (Minneapolis)
I was going to post yet another write-up of a bunch of meals at Grand Szechuan this month but figured they might be getting a bit monotonous*. And so here instead is a writeup of the U of M outpost of Tea House.
Tea House were, I believe, the OG Sichuan pioneer in the Twin Cities—people with actual knowledge of the history of Chinese food in the area should feel free to correct me if this is wrong (we’ve only been here since 2007). When we first got here they were recommended to us when we asked about Sichuan options. We had a meal at their St. Paul location and weren’t overly impressed; and then we found Little Szechuan (which was then coming into its prime) and couldn’t see any reason to make a longer drive. And after Chef Luo opened Grand Szechuan it’s been hard to go anywhere else (though we did like both our meals at Szechuan Spice quite a bit).
A&L Chinese: Dim Sum in Inver Grove Heights (Minnesota)
We’re not very enamoured of the dim sum choices in the Twin Cities metro area. Yangtze is the best, in our opinion, and it’s no great shakes in the abstract, and certainly not worth the long round-trip or the long waits on the weekends. Mandarin Kitchen is the other popular choice and our last meal there was downright depressing, bordering on disgusting. As a result we tend to save dim sum eating for when we’re in Los Angeles and only make the trek out to St. Louis park to Yangtze if guests or friends really want to go. (I wrote about all this last year in a post that I gather made some people a little unhappy with me.) Continue reading