Cautious but Competent

Hong Kong Restaurant opened about six months ago, as far as I can
tell (the restaurant has no Web site I can find, and it’s gotten almost
no press) in what could be an unwise location: a couple of doors down
from the well-established Seri Melaka, in a strip mall near the
northwest corner of Broadway Boulevard and Wilmot Road. How can a new
Asian restaurant compete with a neighboring one with a longtime, loyal
clientele?

Despite a bit of menu overlap, the two restaurants offer fairly
distinct fare. Seri Melaka is mainly Malaysian with a Chinese
influence, while Hong Kong is a traditional American-Chinese restaurant
that also features a few Thai curries. Still, Hong Kong bills itself as
a purveyor of Asian—not specifically Chinese—cuisine, and
even the spare, tasteful décor is rather ambiguous; it strikes
me as a bit more Thai, perhaps, than Chinese. The background music
avoids the Asian issue entirely; last week, it was piped in from KMXZ
FM 94.9, aka MIXfm.

Even so, Hong Kong Restaurant dishes up predominantly Chinese food
that will pretty much meet the expectations of the average local Anglo
diner: nothing exotic, nothing really striking in flavor, but nothing
offensive, either. (Oddly, the restaurant has no cream for one’s
coffee; according to our waiter, the owners “don’t get that concept
yet.”)

The laminated card listing the lunch specials ($5.95 and $6.95) has
asterisks rather than little peppers next to some items, and when I
asked the waiter if the asterisks indicated spiciness, he said yes, and
that the heat could easily be dialed back. Obviously, he didn’t know
who he was talking to—if anything, I prefer the heat to be pumped
up. Of course, the chef can make most things hotter, too, but the
waiter’s automatic assurance that I wouldn’t have to strip the skin off
my tongue suggests that he’s accustomed to dealing with more cautious
diners. Some of the food bears this out.

The lunch specials were more satisfying than the rather ordinary
entrées we had for dinner. Between 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m., for
$5.95, you get one of 17 entrées with egg drop soup, an egg roll
and about half a cup of rice. (The menu promises fried rice, but what
was on the plate was steamed; at least you can choose between white or
brown.) The $6.95 special offers one of 15 other entrées, plus
rice, an egg roll, either egg drop or hot and sour soup, and crab
puffs.

The egg rolls were small and had very little filling, and the crab
puffs allowed the flavor of cream cheese to prevail over that of the
wrappers, although it was hard to detect any crab in there. The rice,
both white and brown, was tender and not sticky. The hot and sour soup
was nice and peppery with a strong beef-broth flavor, and the
chicken-broth taste of the egg drop soup came through with full
force.

As it turned out, the main components of the two entrées we
tried looked identical. Both the sweet and sour pork and General Tso’s
chicken were deep-fried nuggets of tender meat, encased in crispy puffs
as smooth as dumplings. The pork, as usual, came with green pepper,
carrot, onions and the indispensable pineapple, the latter ingredient
in rather short supply, but it was sufficient enough to make an
impression. The chicken mingled with green onions and little hot
peppers in a tangy sauce. If you don’t like pepper heat, slide those
little varmints to the side. If you do eat them, proceed carefully;
they make little impact initially, but have a cumulative effect. By the
end of the meal, perspiration was plastering my hair to my scalp, which
means that the heat was about where I like it on the Scoville
scale.

Come dinner time, we started with the half-dozen potstickers
($5.95), bits of pork, cabbage and ginger (the key ingredient here)
wrapped in shells and pan-fried, served with a sweet dipping sauce. The
sauce and the ginger combined most pleasantly, but there didn’t seem to
be much food for the price.

The dragon and phoenix dish ($11.95) tossed together slices of
chicken, shrimp, beef and a little crab meat with broccoli, carrot,
Chinese cabbage, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts and snow
peas in a brown sauce. Surprisingly for a stir-fry preparation, the
veggies were a little overcooked, but the meat—especially the
beef—had just the right consistency and tenderness.

In contrast, the moo goo gai pan ($7.95) benefited from nicely crisp
vegetables—carrot, baby corn, water chestnuts, broccoli, snow
peas and bamboo shoots, plus mushrooms—along with the featured
sliced chicken. But the light sauce was so mild as to have hardly any
impact at all; the mouth feel was right, but the flavor was bland.

Perhaps this was only coincidental, but immediately upon finishing
the dragon and phoenix dish, I had a strong, if brief, allergic
reaction. Maybe it was to something in the air (the air at home; we
were eating takeout), because I’ve never had a problem with anything
that was likely to be in the dish—neither shrimp nor peanut oil
nor even MSG has ever affected me this way. So I won’t blame it on the
food, but if you have certain sensitivities, you should ask your server
what you’re getting into.

Otherwise, what you’re getting into is cautious but professional
preparations of standard Chinese fare, fully adequate to the task but
not very exciting.

This article appears in May 14-20, 2009.