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| - The food here was good, and the service was good. The atmosphere is also nice. I don't know why I'm giving such low marks, given that if this had been anywhere else (meaning, less hyped up), it would have gotten 4 stars. I think the part that brings this place down is the unwarranted association between Chinese food and cheap food. Somehow, you think that Chinese food is typically cheap, so you are aghast at the prices that Richard Chen's charge.
Allow me to say that this association is unwarranted here. The quality of the ingredients used is as high or higher than the other expensive restaurants in Pittsburgh. For example, we had the sea bass clay pot, and the sea bass was legitimately chilean sea bass, which is quite expensive. The beef for the Mongolian beef dish was also very high quality. So even though the dishes are not a radical departure from traditional Chinese food, the ingredients most certainly are of higher quality.
That being said, I don't think that simply putting more expensive ingredients into a Chinese dish automatically raises the inventiveness of the dish. And that is probably what disappoints me the most about this place.
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