The few Twin Citizens who read all my local food/restaurant write-ups are doubtless sick of my moaning endlessly about the general quality of Asian food in the area. I’m sure I come off like a poseur who wants everyone to know that he knows better than everyone else; or, worse, like an insufferable jerk who wants people to feel bad about what they enjoy. Now I don’t deny that I am an annoying bastard (see the title of this blog) but my version of events is that a) when it comes to most Asian cuisines I have a frame of reference (a decade in Los Angeles and regular visits every year since) against which almost everything in Minnesota pales*, and which I am not willing to let go of to make my gastronomic life here seem better than it is; and b) I do want things to get better and hope they can, and I don’t think overpraising the mediocre or muting criticism is going to get us there. Please bear in mind that I do not have this attitude towards our fine dining scene. We now have a number of restaurants in that genre that would be competitive even in the major metros. But this is just not true when it comes to Asian food. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Dim Sum
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
Dim Sum at Elite (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
I am currently in Los Angeles for a couple of weeks with the family, visiting in-laws and catching up with some old friends. As I have a backlog of tasting notes saved up, whisky reviews will continue to appear regularly, but I am going to also be posting discussions and photographs of some of the meals we will be eating. Here to start is a report on our dim sum lunch from yesterday. Please excuse the quality of the pictures. I have a 8 year old Canon Powershot with a scratched lens and have never been the best amateur food photographer, and my clean-up abilities in Photoshop are only marginally better. Continue reading