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| - 4 for the food, 3 for the service, and 3 for overall prices.
I'm Cantonese. I've had some Northern Chinese food, but I wouldn't say I'm particularly versed in it. My parents can read Chinese, so that does give me a slightly edge over those who can't read Chinese, but even then, some names are unfamiliar to us. My parents attempted to communicate in broken Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. The lady could understand a tiny bit of Cantonese and next to no English. This made things quite complicated. For English only speakers, you can still order, but point on the menu to what you want to order. After some effort on both sides, we ordered some items that were recommended to us for sharing.
We ordered steamed spareribs with rice flour ($6.50), special Sichuan house noodles ($6.00), and dumpling with special hot sauce ($6.50).
We had no idea what rice flour meant when we ordered the spare ribs. We were thinking something noodle-esque. We were dead wrong. We received a small plate of cubed potatoes surrounded by spare rib bits (some with and some without bones), covered in what I'm guessing was a rice flour mixture. It looked like a pile of mush. Basically, that's what the mouth-feel of it was as well. The dish was tasty, and felt like it was spicy without actually being spicy. It was interesting, but for the price to portion, I would not order it again.
The dumplings with special hot sauce came 12 to an order. The wrappers are fairly thin and fairly large. The filling wasn't very big, but if they had been, they wouldn't have been able to pick up sauce the way they were made to. The hot sauce wasn't very hot. It was very fragrant and slightly sweet. Also garlicky. Mmmm. At $6.50, it isn't super expensive, but I wouldn't consider it a cheap eat either. I'm still thinking about whether the price is justifiable or not.
The noodles were my favorite dish of the night. We got ours slightly spicy (the other options being super spicy and not spicy). These noodles came in soup and had a small amount of minced pork, green onions, and fried soy beans (pretty sure that's what those were) on top. Oh. Also a bit of chili oil. The noodles were soft and had a nice chew. If what we understood was correct, they did not make these noodles in house. I greatly appreciated the additional texture the fried beans added to my noodles. Also chili oil, cuz chili oil, especially homemade, is one of my favorite condiments ever. For $6.00, this was a good portion, and I'd order these again.
We did hit a few service issues. This isn't really a sit-down restaurant. They have two tables for two and a bar counter that seats four. We were a party of three, so we sat at the bar counter. That was fine with us. The lady recommended that we share the dishes we got, but she did not give us bowls to share the food until we asked for them. If we were at a regular table, not having individual bowls would have been manageable, but how on earth were we expected to share a dish of pork ribs with the three of us sitting side by side? Yeah. That was issue one. I'm not sure if this second one was a cultural thing or not, but my mother asked for tea and the lady said they did not have tea, but did not offer us water or other drinks. Basically, it looks like if you don't pay for drinks, you don't get even water. They do expect tips. They bring food out to your table/counter, and they do wash the dishes after. However, if I don't even get water, tipping isn't going to go so well for them. When my mother thanked them for the tasty food (and she said it in those words, and in Mandarin that even I could understand), the lady just said "Good". They got less than 10% tip tonight.
If I'm in the area, I might stop by for the noodles again, but we'll see. There's plenty more restaurants to explore in the area!
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