Sun Luck Garden: A Treat No Matter When You Go

I have eaten at Annie Chiu's Sun Luck Garden restaurant over the last several years and have really fallen in love with the quality and inventiveness of her food. She has an amazing eye for detail and accepts no shortcuts when it comes to what she serves in her restaurant. To boot she is always cheery and helpful and that infectiousness transfers nicely to her staff.

After a recent viewing of the New York Metropolitan Opera's The Audition (fabulous, by the way, if you ever have a chance to see it), my companion and I agreed that Sun Luck was to be our dining destination for the evening. Fortunately, my friend had the foresight to call ahead and make a reservation for us. Not ten minutes after we arrived (about 5:20 PM on a Sunday), the place was PACKED.

For starters, I had ordered hot tea. However, it was so noisy that my waiter misheard me and mistakenly brought me hot sake. Now, normally I would've sent it back, but it's been ages since I had a nice hot sake and decided instead to keep it. The sake came in a wonderful little porcelain serving vessel and matching cup:


While Annie has many wonderful soups on her menu, both my dining companion and I decided to go with the curry butternut squash soup. It is a clear broth (think Wonton soup) with dumplings that have a lovely curried butternut squash puree in them.


This was a heavenly cup of soup. The broth was seasoned perfectly and had a real depth of flavor. It was both salty and just slightly sweet, the way that pork can be if prepared correctly. The dumpling was also wonderful. There was just a kiss of curry in the butternut squash puree and the dumpling texture itself was just lovely. Cooked all the way through, with just a little resistance to the tooth.

Next up, we decided to split an appetizer. Although my friend highly recommended the crab rangoon, I was skeptical. I've eaten my fair share of crab rangoon and while I do occasionally come across one that I like, they are usually a disappointment. Not only did Annie's version not disappoint, but it sought to reinvent what a good crab rangoon should be:


The filling in these deep fried wrappers was uniquely Annie's. There was the bit of cream cheese and crab, but there was so much more. A bit of heat, a bit of herbs. And the dipping sauce wasn't the day-glo red sweet and sour sauce you find on every other Americanized Chinese restaurant menu. This was something unique ... sour, sweet, and something else ... akin to a good Nuoc Cham. My dining companion knew what the secret ingredient was and when I guessed, she was impressed and said, "Close!" I won't tell you the actual ingredient, because I want you, the gentle reader, to try this out for yourself and make your own guess. Don't worry, I'll tell you if you guess correctly!

Next up, the entrees. I've always wanted to order the Ma Pou Dofu at Sun Luck, but have just never gotten around to it. This time, I decided I had to have it. As I've learned from a previous visit to Sun Luck, if you want it with a decent amount of heat, you have to order it "Spicy, spicy!" Which is exactly what I did. And this is what was brought to the table:


Now, the unusual thing about Annie's Ma Pou Dofu presentation is that she chops the tofu finely instead of leaving them in larger cubes, which is how most other restaurants serve it. While looking a little unappetizing (I'll leave you to figure out what I mean by looking at the photo), it actually worked very well because everything was basically the same size as the rice. I put a little rice down on my plate, spooned over some Ma Pou Dofu, mixed it a bit with my chopsticks, and the result was marvelous! Salty, sweet (from the ground pork), appropriately spicy, and creamy from the tofu. My dining companion was equally as pleased with the result.

The other entree we ordered was something not even on the menu. Knowing the magic that Annie can create, my dining companion ordered a baby ginger and dark tofu dish. Here is what came out of the kitchen:


It's a little blurry, but this had mushrooms, sliced ginger, dark tofu, carrots, broccoli, and onions. Annie's dark tofu dishes are legendary among her devoted fans and there is a reason: it is amazingly delicious, even to meat eaters. If I had to become vegetarian or vegan, THIS is the dish I would order day in and day out. It was a mix of all thing savory, crispy, creamy, and meaty (without any meat, obviously).

Finally, it should be noted that Annie spent some time as a pastry chef. Her desserts, while not all necessarily true to her Asian heritage, are scrumptious and always worth a look. In fact, my dining companion actually wanted to know what the dessert specials were before ordering any of her food so that she could plan appropriately. From the desserts specials for the day, we ordered the homemade banana ice cream with hot fudge and a blood orange sorbet. That's Annie in the background:


I had the blood orange sorbet. It was the perfect way to end the meal as the acid from the blood oranges cuts through the heaviness of the previous courses. It was nicely balanced with sweet and sour and oddly enough, had much more of a granita-like texture than a sorbet. There were several other sorbet flavors available, but I know the short season for blood oranges and decided to give this one a go.

I also tried a spoonful of my friend's ice cream. It was everything you hoped for in a homemade ice cream. And the hot fudge sauce was rich and chocolate-y and wonderful. If it wasn't perishable, I would be encouraging Annie to bottle the stuff up and start selling it. She could have a successful side business with just that alone.

As her website indicates, Annie is interested in cooking contemporary Chinese cuisine. Starting with techniques and recipes from traditional cuisine and adapting them for the ingredients that are available to you, she serves up something that is unique and delicious. I'm just grateful that I get to eat it. Clearly, Sun Luck Garden is highly recommended.

Wonton Gourmet Strikes Again!

Even though I've written about it once before, I cannot say enough good things about Wonton Gourmet located at the corner of East 32nd and Payne Avenue near downtown Cleveland. I've been there probably a half dozen times since the last time I wrote up anything about them and finally decided that today I would take my regular camera to snap some photos of our experience. Wonton Gourmet can be enjoyed by yourself, but it is really when eating out with a crowd that the meal really shines. It still amazes me that you can order so much incredibly interesting and amazing Chinese food and have the resulting bill still be so inexpensive.

One thing to know from the last post I made is that they've replaced all the wall placards (the specials written only in Chinese characters) with new placards that include a picture of the dish, the price, and an English translation underneath. So now there is absolutely NO reason to be scared of the menu anymore.

Our group of seven started out with some appetizers (which is what we normally do). First, the chive potstickers:


Filled with succulent shrimp and fresh chives, these to me are hands down the best examples of potstickers I have ever come across. The sweetness from the shrimp, the spiciness from the chives, the saltiness from the dipping sauce ... heavenly!

Next up is a crueller (literally a donut) that has been fried, then wrapped in a rice noodle and topped with a sweet/soy sauce. It is such a layered dish in terms of flavors and textures. I highly recommend it.


Our final appetizer was the ever popular and always delicious turnip cakes. While good on their own, when eaten with a bit of chili oil and chili flakes, it's like you've just turned up the flavor amplitude to eleven. Creamy, crispy, spicy, and savory all in one bite.


After the appetizers, we decided to try the shredded pork chow mien. This consisted of pork, mushrooms, sprouts, crispy fried thin noodles and a lovely clear "sauce" holding everything together. This was quite good, but didn't strike me as something I would order again, given the vast array of other wonderful things on the menu. I'm glad I tried it though. I'd recommend the pork ramen noodle soup in it's place (holy crap, it is so delicious and would make a perfect lunch).


Next, it was time for soup. Shrimp dumplings in broth, to be exact. The dumplings didn't have chives in them, so it didn't have that onion sharpness to it, but the dumplings were equally as tender and sweet as before. The soup provided a nice savory counterpoint to the dumplings. This could've definitely been a meal for one person, but it served all seven of us nicely as a soup course.


For our green course, we opted to listen to the suggestion of our waiter and get the Tung Choi with garlic. We've had this before and were happy to have it again. I tell you, if i had had access to vegetables like this growing up, I would've become a fan all things vegetative much sooner in life. They were very good. Crisp and garlicy (but not overly so).


Next up, a dish that I first had when I attended the Chinese New Year's feast that some very good friends arranged at the beginning of February, Hong Kong Style chicken. This is such a wonderful way to serve chicken. The meat is always moist and delicious. The skin is crispy. And it is served with an interesting dipping "salt" made up of MSG and ground pepper. I've tried it with and without the "salt" and prefer mine without. But, hey, to each his own, right?


For our final course, the owner had told us several visits ago that they were able to get these amazingly fresh and HUGE oysters from the west coast and they are grilled and served with a spicy black bean sauce. The first moment we tried them, we were hooked.


The oyster is incredibly large but still tender, the black bean sauce is salty, spicy, gingery, garlicy, and lots of other words ending in 'y'. Best eaten over a small bowl of rice. Yum. Yum. Yum.

And the most amazing part of this meal was that the bill for all seven of us was $80 before tip. Even with a nice tip, it came to a measly $14.30 per person. Holy crap! I also happened to notice that they are open until midnight almost every night, so there really is no reason not to get yourself out there and give this a try. You won't be disappointed.

Fumble? Yes. Recovery? Most definitely.

Not that I am one to use football terminology casually, but I felt that after Friday's disastrous adventure to the Euclid Tavern, today needed to be a knock-out. After suggesting several options for lunch that turned out not to have lunch hours, I finally suggested Hunan East on Richmond Road, right across the street from the Richmond Mall. It was originally suggested to me by a good friend and when I was working up in Richmond Heights about a year ago, I visited there several times with good results.

The key to a good meal at Hunan East is knowing to ask for the "Chinese" menu. When you initially walk in, they give you the Americanized Chinese menu (Sweet & Sour, General Tso's, etc.). The Chinese menu pictorially describes about 3 dozen various authentic Chinese dishes. An English translation is written below the pictures. My friends and I decided we would do family style dining and we each ordered an entree from the menu that suited our fancy.

My friend Chris ordered the shredded pork and shredded pressed tofu in soy sauce:


This was quite good and while the dish was seasoned nicely with soy, there wasn't any "sauce" to speak of. It had all been absorbed by the dish. Mike liked the look of the scallops in black bean sauce:


This came out on one of those sizzling hotplates you normally see in Mexican restaurants when someone orders fajitas. I found out later from the friend who had originally recommended Hunan East that this is how black bean dishes are traditionally served. This dish was also a slam dunk. The fermented black beans had a nice piquancy to them and the scallops were simply divine. They were tender and succulent, with just the right amount of seasoning. Of the three dishes we ordered, only this one was polished off.

Finally, when I saw it on the menu, I knew I had to order it: Ma Po Tofu.


I ordered it extra spicy, or "la", and boy did it deliver. Besides the jalapeno peppers (which were also in the shredded pork dish), there were also other kinds of peppers in there as well, although I didn't detect any Szechwan peppercorns. This had a really nice heat level to it, although it didn't blow your head off. To my palate, the heat of this dish was more of a back-of-the-throat heat, as opposed to a front-of-the-mouth heat. The balance between the creaminess of the tofu and the texture of the ground pork was also very nice.

All three of us declared that Hunan East had indeed delivered on a fantastic meal. It was also a great value, at about $12 per person with food left over. Highly recommended.

Heeeeeeeeeeere's Johnny!

I've been looking forward to trying the re-opened Euclid Tavern since I learned that it was back in existence about two months ago. Now, I realize that I shouldn't expect it to be exactly the same as it was before. After all, it had new owners.

So, it was with great trepidation that myself and my friends Mike and Chris cautiously approached the front door. All seemed well when we saw this colorful display:


Alas, that is the only photo you will see from the Euclid Tavern for two very important reasons. First, the bar itself was very dimly lit. As my phone has no flash, any photos I took would've not come out at all. Secondly, and more importantly, sadly, the food we had was just not good. We had fully intended to spend the entire evening there, starting out with some wings, graduating to some sandwiches, and finishing it off with a pitcher or two of beer.

The menu actually looked promising. Many of the items purported to be homemade. There were eight different sauces you could pick from on the chicken wing menu alone. Since you can order wings by 6 or 12, we decided to start out with 4 different flavors of wings: sesame oriental, sweet chili, spicy bacon, and Japanese sriracha. Yes, you read that right, Japanese sriracha. Um, isn't sriracha typically associated with Vietnamese cuisine?

The wings themselves (as far as a chicken wing goes) were meaty and cooked well and had a nice crispy exterior. Unfortunately, that was where their goodness ended. Both the sesame oriental and sweet chili sauces were grossly undersalted, although the sweet chili was slightly better. The spicy bacon wings were unanimously voted as the best, although the only reason I think it won was because the bacon actually properly seasoned the sauce. The Japanese sriracha just wasn't good. The primary flavor that came through was tomato paste. You really could've done a wonderful Vietnamese take on a chicken wing and incorporated sriracha into it. This concoction, was neither Japanese nor Vietnamese. It was simply not good. The other universal complaint was that three of the types of wings had that sticky glaze on the wing and was not really a sauce at all.

When our server came back, I asked her if the sauces were made in house or came out of a bottle. She indicated that some were homemade and some weren't. She did indicate that of the ones that weren't made in house, the chef would doctor them with little tweaks. Honestly, none of us felt that any of those could've been homemade.

When it came time to decide whether we wanted to order additional things from the menu, we unanimously decided to go somewhere else for dinner.

Which landed us at Q Doba. Where I had this:


Soft tacos with grilled chicken, tomato, lettuce, and corn salsa. It was *okay*. All three of us were pretty darn disappointed with the Euclid Tavern: NOT because the wings didn't taste like they did 15 years ago, but because the wings they served just weren't good.

All three of us agreed that a haiku detailing our experience tonight is in order.

Oh, Euclid Tavern,
immense anticipation,
did not deliver.

Wonton Gourmet: Fab-u-lous!

To me, Wonton Gourmet is like sushi. I can go for months without even entertaining the thought of sushi and then one day, WHAM! I can think of having nothing else but sushi. In very much the same light, when I get a craving for really good, authentic Chinese cuisine, I have found nothing better satisfies that craving than Wonton Gourmet, located on the corner of East 32nd and Payne near downtown Cleveland. Their particular cuisine is Hunan style, so nothing is overtly spicy, although there is always chili flakes in oil on the table as a condiment.

Last Sunday, having finished my lovely gelato, I suddenly got such a craving. I called up a few of my Cleveland friends and suddenly we had a lovely dinner party for five people. We descended on the restaurant around 6 pm and were warmly greeted by several members of the staff who recognized several members of our dining group. Normally when a group of non-Asians walks through the door, the first thing they normally put down on the table are forks. For us, they put down the standard chopsticks. While you can simply go by yourself, it is much more fun for a group because of all the dishes you can share.

There are actually three menus from which you can order. Two of them have English translations, but the third one, the daily specials, are written on placards that hang on the wall. For those, you must ask for the translation (or as my smart friend Stuart did, take a photo of the characters, post the photo on Flickr, and invite people to actually post notes on the photo with the translation). Since our group had gone at a very slow time during the day, it wasn't too big of a deal to ask for their time in translating whatever we needed.

We ordered dishes from all three menus. First we started with a fish maw and conpoy soup, served with red vinegar.


I have had this before and it is really, really delicious. The soup all by itself is really a well balanced soup. The red vinegar adds a touch of acidity and sweetness (kind of like a balsamic vinegar would). I was actually thinking of having a second bowl of soup when this arrived:


These are fried rice noodle rolls with soy sauce. Incredibly delicious, they are crispy and warm and soft all at the same time. Eaten with some chili oil (which is to the left of the photo), our table quickly gobbled these up. Next up were the house made turnip cakes, which unfortunately I did not get a photo of. I think there are two things I would ALWAYS order if I have a meal here: the turnip cakes and the chive potstickers, pictured here:


These are probably some of the best (and most consistent) potstickers I've ever had at any restaurant. And so fresh. So, at this point, the soup and appetizers are out of the way. Now come the main courses. First up, clams with spicy black bean sauce (towards the back of the photo):


This was spooned over white rice and was quite good. Another member of our group who had eaten the black bean sauce before said this one wasn't quite as good as she remembered, but I thought it was delicious nonetheless. Next up was was a dish that was hanging on the wall menu, braised pork belly with pickles.


This was very soft and tender and the pork did melt in your mouth, but this wasn't the best preparation of pork belly I've ever had. The "pickles" were nice though. If that weren't enough food already, we placed an order for the fried pork chops.


The pork was nicely fried (it wasn't greasy at all), but to me the pork was a little dry. It was served with slices scallions and chilis, but it didn't have a sauce, per se, so it didn't make too much sense to eat this over rice. Finally, (getting full yet?) on the recommendation of our server, we placed an order for fried fish and Japanese tofu. The "scallops" in the photo are actually the tofu, which they somehow managed to sear. I thought this one was good, but it didn't blow me away. Perhaps because we had all reached our gustatory limits.


Now, you might be thinking to yourself, how much did this ravenous feast cost? After filling your belly with the most amazing food, you can now fill your brain with the wonderful thought that all of this food, without tip, was a mere $14.40 per person. And we had leftovers to take home. Truly, truly amazing.

Needless to say, my craving for Hunan style Chinese cuisine has now been quenched. I'm kind of glad I live far enough away to make it sort of an effort to get to Wonton Gourmet. I think if I lived in Cleveland, I'd be eating there ALL the time.