rev:text
| - They have good food... if they have it.
I was really excited to see this restaurant appear in Cleveland. We've needed a decent place for soup dumplings for a long time, and the menu looked awesome. My party arrived around 6:15PM on a Saturday for dinner.
After being seated and looking at the menus for a while, our waiter mentioned that three menu items (the two non-soup-buns and cucumber) were not available. Too bad, since they looked great and everyone wanted to try one. We got more soup dumplings instead. Then, after placing our orders, a few minutes later the waiter came back again to mention they were almost out of their wide noodles. Of the four of us who ordered them, only one could still get their dish. Like a some kind of surreal restaurant reality TV show, we had to figure out which lucky person got the dish they wanted and who had to compromise. Grandma, of course, won out. I do get it. Restaurants run out of things (though running out of a third the menu at 6pm on a Saturday is a bit much). The issue was that our waiter didn't mention it at the start of things. That said, he was very apologetic that we couldn't order from half of the menu.
The soup dumplings were good. They weren't the best that I've ever had, but they were solid. They didn't stick to the paper or fall apart on the spoon, which is always a good sign. I would happily order them again, and I feel that other reviewers' comparisons to Din Tai Fong are fair. For the one person who got their pan fried noodles, they said they were very good. My compromise dish, their soup with dumplings, was okay but not amazing. Fellow diners who had the chongqing soup noodles liked them, though they wished for more ingredients in the bowl besides noodles. The vegetarian enjoyed their noodle dish, but also wanted more toppings.
Overall the food was decent, but playing Mexican standoff with wide noodles was not an anticipated form of entertainment.
|