I did visit and shortly after they opened. Food was good but the interior was a bit dated and the service was spotty. I haven’t been back mainly because MuLan is just down the street.
On the few times I have been in the food court at the 99, I have looked at their menu but nothing stood out. They also had zero customers during my visits.
that is unfortunate
did you mean china gourmet? fuzhou gourmet is in quincy
For that, you’d want to talk to @Hyperbowler about it. I am sure he has some opinions on what works well for him so far.
Just FYI, I believe the SF map focuses on non-Cantonese/ Hong Kong cuisine, mostly because Canton/HK restaurants are numerous here in the Bay Area and would make a standalone project. No reason you need to exclude them in Boston however.
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Spicepepper Garden Taiwanese 36 Great Rd, Acton, MA 01720
Sorry, yes, I meant Quincy. Which reminds me, Quincy also has Chili Square.
Thanks all for your suggestions. @Hyperbowler was very helpful, and actually modified his map to look a little more like mine. He also forwarded some useful tips and info resources.
I’m working on annotating what I know about the restaurants, as the ones on the map are all ones that I have eaten at myself, at least once. Adding new restaurants will unfortunately be a slow and drawn out process, as I want to go try the places out myself before adding them (and little of my business brings me to Newton these days). I also retain some suspicion of places that offer cuisines of multiple regions of Asia. Sichuanese, Shandong, and Shanghai might be OK, but mapo doufu, sushi, and bibimbap doesn’t smack of a high likelihood of authenticity to me.
I put in some annotations in the main title of the map, to include links that I thought were useful with more information about the characteristic dishes of various regions. I’m adding Yelp links to each of the restaurants and links to my own Chowhound reviews, where I have them.
Thanks all for your suggestions and support!
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This sounded like a really useful thing, but not taking outside recommendations makes it just your project, and it will grow to slowly to make it of interest. All the people that added links must like the places they recommended, so maybe you should reconsider. Feel free to add links to my blog if you want.
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This is a tough one for me. I remain a little leery of reviews in places like Yelp or Zagat, because when crowdsourced reviews are open to the general public, you wind up with a significant number of uninformed opinions. I realize that the crowd that posts to a group like this are somewhat more sophisticated, but even among the recommendations that have flooded out, some have come to places that I have some familiarity with but less than 100% enthusiasm (New Shanghai in Chinatown, which didn’t bowl me over as a Sichuan place, was so-so as a Shanghai place, and looked to me like a Taiwanese place with the wrong name; Changsho, which has struck me as iconic, but for the Americanized Cantonese food that I am seeking to steer clear of; Silk Road, admittedly controversial, and I was spectacularly underwhelmed by an excursion there).
I recognize that the downside of having a personally curated list is that it’s driven by how quickly I can get to places, and obsolete if places go out of business, but well, it’s one person’s specific tastes. Thinking through how best to do this (though unfortunately I don’t have tons of time in which to do this.)
For what it’s worth, there also is no restriction on having only one Google Map; someone could easily take the map I’ve created, duplicate it, put on a moniker to distinguish (The HungryOnion Guide to Regional Chinese Cooking in Greater Boston), then add to your heart’s content.
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I think you have to decide whether this is a comprehensive list of all Regional Chinese Cooking, or a curated list of Regional Chinese cooking that’s not meant to be comprehensive.
For Bay Area, there just are too many Chinese restaurants for any one person to visit all. The list is I believe meant to be comprehensive. I think the crowdsourcing path invites feedback sharing and ongoing participation. A curated list is more like a blog entry.
I probably don’t like many of the Chinese restaurants in the Bay Area, but that’s influenced by the kind of food I grew up with. haha. Though that didn’t prevent many others from enjoying the same food.
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Wish I’d been aware earlier that this was only intended to be for places worth recommending, as I would’ve made a much smaller list…
Sei Bar is my current favorite as it is consistent, unique for the area, cooks with pride, and bears a high degree of similarity to my parents’ cooking. Grading all other restaurants on a curve where Sei Bar is at an artificial 10/10, here are the only other places I take my parents, with everywhere else that I’ve been to being disappointing:
Taipei Cuisine 9/10
Sichuan Gourmet 7/10 (would be higher except knowing what to order is a huge factor)
Red Pepper (defunct Framingham location only) 9/10
Chilli Garden 8/10
Five Spices House 7.5/10
Mulan 9/10
Cilantro 8/10
Jean & Lee 7/10
Chef Chang’s 8/10 (as of when they first opened, unsure about these days)
Shanghai Fresh 8/10
Spicy World 7/10 (not at all skilled, but tasty in a brute force sort of way)
P.S. I had a truly exceptional 沸腾鱼 at New Shanghai once, so I’d personally go back, but the other dishes being mostly middling means I would’t necessarily bring the whole family.
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Do you have particular menu recs at Chilli Garden and Sei Bar (and for the latter, do you recommend all three locations)?
thanks.
This is one of those examples of where the problems come in; I haven’t had so much luck ordering at Chilli Garden or Cilantro.
I’m perfectly happy to lend the design to a crowdsourced Hungryonion guide, though I don’t have the wherewithal or the energy or the time to edit it. If we did this, we’d need to decide if there’s a single moderator or group of moderators and a message board with people making suggestions, or if anybody could edit the map (each has advantages and disadvantages).
Organizing the map is something else that concerns me. The “layers” feature in Google Maps allows for a limited number of regions. Hungrybowler in SF points out this piece https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/z4dg4j/dividing-and-conquering-the-cuisines-of-china that divides Chinese cookery into five great regions, then subregions within those five regions. I wonder if we should use those five great divisions, then use specific colors within the regions to signify specific provincial cooking.
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Chilli Garden: the “Chef’s Signature Dry Braise Pepper Dishes” (aka “gan guo”/“dry wok”) series and the “Chef’s Signature Fresh Green Peppercorn Dishes” series, as well as a few of the Sichuan chef’s specials, which I plan on continuing to explore.
Sei Bar: pretty much anything on the menu, but only the Wakefield location.
A few recent favorites: Grilled Pepper w. Preserved Duck Egg, Quick-fried Spicy Pork Liver, Pork Dry Pot, and the crawfish special they had in the summer
My treatment of Cilantro/Chilli Garden/Sichuan Gourmet is to disregard the main menu and focus exclusively on the specials and what Chinese locals in my Wechat group have recommended. Cilantro came to my attention only recently because of the specials they’ve added, and my visit a couple of months ago, consisting only of new dishes not found elsewhere, was excellent. FYI - Chilli Garden’s head chef is not always there, as our server warned when we’d try to order the more demanding menu items.
If this thread is inspiring anyone to discover new dishes at places that were disappointing to them previously, I think that in itself has some value.
But that’s the whole reason I rate Sei Bar so highly - I’ve never experienced a miss, and neither have any of the tables I’ve sat by. The most likely reason is that each offering lands on the menu because the chef is fairly confident about it, and not because he feels obliged to cook it based on customer expectations, as would have been the case for any number of Sichuan standards such as double cooked pork, ma po tofu, dan dan noodles, water boiled fish, etc.
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Were you referring to Mu Lan in Waltham or in Cambridge? Or both?
Rosulate, you know that the chef’s specials at Sichuan Gourmet vary between the locations, right? Try the JinGu Frog Meat in Framingham. Weekend only.
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is this the place in Quincy?
Thanks for the advice. While I hope to get to Wakefield, it’s less likely than a return visit to Chilli Garden. In the past we have enjoyed at Chilli Garden from the Sichuan menu the cilantro with green pepper salad (those are chile peppers, not bells), the Sichuan style cold noodle, the dry braise pepper chicken, and the Sichuan pork dumplings. We’ll branch out a bit more next time. We are hardly Chinese food experts so it’s great to have your suggestions.
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