My wife and I had lunch there on Sunday. I checked the day before and they had several slots open for two that afternoon. It’s a grand space, high ceilinged, spacious and elegant, with reasonable separation between tables. They move with machine-like precision – you check in (and they acknowledge any special requests you might have made at that point), they direct you to a nice holding/seating area, then a tablet-wielding usher comes to escort you to your table. I worry a bit about this because these ushers seem to know exactly whom to go to individually in the waiting area. How are patrons identified? That aside, we were seated precisely at the time of our reservation.
I wasn’t blown away by the food, though. I found everything on the wan side. The fried rice with shrimp was undersalted, although there was certainly plenty of egg, and the rice was clean and greaseless. (A recent crab fried rice from Fish Cheeks was way tastier.) The Taiwanese cabbage with garlic gave off a wondrous aroma of garlic when it arrived, but after we’d gone through the 6–8 garlic slices on top, the rest of the dish was bland. The chicken wontons, although advertised as spicy, were far from (the chili sauce on the table, as well, was more smoky than spicy). Ditto the noodles with diced beef (the best part there was their generosity with the cilantro). The pork sticky rice was the tastiest dish.
I’ll go there again because there are other things I want to try and it’s convenient to my apartment, but it’s not the blockbuster in my backyard that I was hoping for.
