YUAN ZAI BING
A newish Manhattan outpost of a restaurant with two Brooklyn branches. Taishan / Toisan provenance was the draw highlighted by @DaveCook.
The menu looks mostly familiar, with a few specialties of the region enhancing it.
We ate yellow eel clay pot rice, 5 spice braised duck, chicken with hairy fig, lotus root stir-fry, pea leaves with broth, and e-fu noodles with crab. Complimentary oranges at the end (which are mysteriously always sweet, unlike the ones at home).
The food for me ranged from very good to fine, but the place being spacious and uncrowded also contributed to a relaxed and enjoyable meal.
The chicken and the duck were my favorites, the chicken perhaps even better than the duck. I could not detect the flavor of hairy fig / peach, it was like a very well done Cantonese white-cut / poached chicken. The duck was more intense with 5-spice and a bit salty from the soy sauce (plain rice would have been a good foil).
The vegetables were fresh and tasty, as they usually are (and as I’ve noticed of late, as or more expensive than the meats).
The noodles and the rice were both slightly disappointing for me – noodles were dry and lacking much in the way of additions, and and the rice was… fine. I am not an eel fan, and fortunately for me (but perhaps not for those who wanted eel), there was not much (any) flavor of eel, just the sauce that was poured over. (The saucing was the same for the 3 types of clay pot rice I hate in Hong Kong recently, but the toppings were in much higher proportion and so flavored the rice intensely — for eg, someone who didn’t like chinese sausage in one pot much couldn’t pick around it, because the whole pot tasted of it, whereas, after the first cautious taste, I had no such problem regarding the eel.)
Always good to eat and chat with this crew, and I’d go back again to sample more of the menu (and to eat more of the chicken and the duck).
