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| - The layout of the dining room here is really weird. Not only is it cramped, a strategy employed to maximize seating and thus the takings, when you step through the door, you feel as if you're confronted by a phalanx of tables. Somehow, you'll just have to bust your way through.
I recall liking this restaurant a couple years ago, when the food was comparable in quality to others on the same strip, like E-Pan or Lee Garden. This was not the case tonight.
While the complimentary soup of the day was fine, the steamed chicken (guifeiji) was merely edible. One of my dinner companions actually exclaimed, only half-jokingly, "What IS that?" right in front of the server. While I suppose the taste was acceptable when you slather ginger-scallion sauce liberally onto your piece of chicken, it looked like it was just dunked in boiling water too cook, and the texture reflected as much.
The sauteed bean shoot leaves with enoki (yaozhu jin'gu pa doumiao) was a platter of okay-tasting leaves, but capped by a layer of thick cornstarch slurry. Any thicker and it would have been cornstarch jello.
We also ordered steamed sea scallops (suanrong zheng daizi) as they were on special. They were indeed very fresh, but way over cooked, to the point of being a little chewy. What a waste of good seafood.
The steamed fish was probably the best dish of the night, though it too, was overdone.
Overall, it was very disappointing. I was so looking forward to Chinese food. At least the washrooms were clean. We all know that the most important part of a review of a Chinatown restaurant, is the washroom. Oh, and it was cheap. And the service was decent.
I will probably not come again, at least for a long time. There are other, better restaurants on that strip.
[Seems like Yelp strips out the Unicode Chinese characters. Don't they want to expand to China???!!!]
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