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.

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.

Beef on Weck, How I Love Thee!

A dream has finally come true for me. Six years ago, I saw a PBS documentary by Rick Sebak called Sandwiches That You Will Like. Six years ago, I discovered something called the "beef on weck". And I learned that one of the best places (or at least most representative) to get a true beef on weck sandwich was Schwabl's (I apologize that the entire site is Flash -- it wouldn't be my choice, but hey, I wasn't asked to design the site).

Now, I've had a "beef on weck" at BW-3's in Columbus, OH, before they became Buffalo Wild Wings and dropped all mention of the 3rd W from their name (which, incidentally, if you didn't know, meant "Weck"). But I say this to you now: That sandwich was pale, weak, and a pathetic comparison to the real thing. And all you Arby's and Raxx restaurant fans out there are holding nothing to a true beef on weck sandwich.

This was the ultimate end to the day long journey I took when I wrote about stopping at the Fracture Prune in an earlier post. That was simply the warm-up for the main event. Schwabl's is actually incredibly easy to find and is about a 3 1/2 hour trip from Akron, OH. I arrived around 2:30 PM and thought this was a great time to arrive since I would miss both the lunch rush and the dinner rush. Unfortunately, we are talking about a beloved Buffalo landmark. At 2:30 PM, the parking was packed to the brim and there was about a 20 minutes wait for a table. Even if I hadn't driven 3 1/2 hours to get here, it was still worth a 20 minute wait.

The outside of the building was rather unassuming, except for the neon sign above the front door.


Once inside the building, to the right is a full-service bar with about 5 or 6 places to stand (no stools, they would take up room that tables could occupy). To the left of the bar is the carving station. Every other spot is taken up by a table. I was quickly greeted by a pleasant young man who told me that I could stand at the bar while I wait for a table to open up.

The bartender soon came over and asked if I would like anything while I waited. Noticing a sign behind the bar, I decided to try one of their specialty drinks this time of year, a Tom and Jerry. Now, I've heard of this drink, but never had it. And boy, am I glad I did, because this version was silky smooth, delicious, and really warmed me up.


Essentially a Tom and Jerry starts with a egg-based frothy "batter" which is ladled into the cup. A jigger of a brandy and dark rum combination is added and then it is finally filled with very hot (not boiling) water. Sprinkle a little nutmeg on top and you are ready to go. Wow, was that tasty. Kind of like a cross between an eggnog and a hot buttered rum.

As I finished up my Tom and Jerry, a table near the front of the store opened up and I was seated. I knew I was there for the beef on weck, but I was curious to see what else they had on the menu. Chicken, ham, fish ... you could pretty much get something from any meat food group. Sadly, I went on a Friday. On Saturday's they have homemade goulash with dumplings. While I probably couldn't have eaten both, an order certainly would've made it home with me to try later on. Ah well ... just a reason for another visit.

You can get the sandwich by itself, or make it a platter for only $2 more. With the platter, you get your choice of either cole slaw or pickled beets and your choice of potato. First off, let me say that everything is made in-house with the exception of the kummelweck rolls. Those are made by a local baker. Only recently have I found how much I am in love with roasted beets. But the thought of pickled beets of any kind just turned me off. So, I went with the cole slaw and the German potato salad for my sides.

I should also explain the kummelweck (weck is the shortened version of the name) rolls. "Kummel" stands for caraway. So these rolls are encrusted on their tops with caraway seeds and course salt. Sort of the same crunchy texture you find in soft pretzels. The reason why kummelweck has stayed a Buffalo only tradition and chicken wings have not is that it is pretty easy to replicate chicken wings with a fryer and a good sauce. Kummelweck rolls need to be made by an experienced baker and they don't hold real well for shipping purposes.

Schwabl's cooks their steamship rounds in the kitchen and then transfers them to the carving station where you can order any beef temperature you'd like, from rare to well done. I went for medium rare. Here is what I received:


To the left of the plate is the cole slaw, the German potato salad is in the back and to the left of the plate is a single slice of the homemade pickled beets (apparently being used as a garnish). Here's another shot of the sandwich with the bun off:

Mmmm! Nice and medium rare. Also notice, too, behind the plate is a jar of white-ish looking stuff. Every table has a jar of prepared horseradish to be used on your sandwich. And boy, did I use my fair share.

Let's start with the cole slaw. It was mostly green cabbage with a vinegar + sugar + salt dressing. No mayo or dairy to be found. It was simple and good, but a bit one note. The German potato salad was warm, had a nice acidic flavor and the bacon bits in the salad added a nice saltiness to the overall flavor.

Now, onto the sandwich. The beef was exceedingly tender. The roll was exquisitely fresh and tasty. The salt on top of the bun served really two purposes in my mind. First was the textural element it brought to the party. Biting down you had the chewiness of the bread, the crunch of the salt and caraway seed, and the meltingly tender beef. Flavor-wise, the salt served the same purposed as the salt on a soft pretzel. It was purposely over salty, but it played so well with the other flavors. And the horseradish that I added tableside was the perfect spicy foil for the beef. I can see why people from Buffalo claim that they can't find this "taste" anywhere else in the US.

So, after finishing most of my cole slaw, all of my potato salad, and all of my sandwich, all that was left was that single slice of pickled beet. Thinking to myself, I just drove 3 1/2 hours to eat a sandwich. I might as well try the darn beet. So I cut a slice of it fully expecting to hate it. And do you know what?

It.

Was.

Phenomenal.

I couldn't believe how good it was. In less than half a heartbeat I would fully endorse the pickled beets over the cole slaw ANY day. I could've ordered a plate of just the beets and been wholly and utterly happy. They were sweet and tender and had just the perfect balance of flavors without any of that nasty "canned beets" flavor that I was so used to in childhood. In fact, some of the beet juice actually mixed together with the cole slaw and it actually improved the flavor. You go, pickled beets!

Finally, when my plate finally looked like this,


I asked for the check. With my drink and my platter, the total was roughly around $17.50 or so. I quickly paid my check, hopped backed onto I-90 going west and had many pleasant horseradish-related burps on my way home to remind me of this spectacular experience.

I must learn how to make these kummelweck rolls ... they were so superb!