There’s this Cherry Blossom Festival thing going on in the Philadelphia area. Last Saturday, they were having a japanese food tasting at this japanes marketin Narberth – Maido. I’ve never been to it before, even though it’s very close to my house. I thought this would be a good opportunity to check it out and taste some good food, for free.
The market is very cute. I would say 95% of the food is Japanese, and the rest various Asian. They even have a food counter so you can get some hot food. So far as this food tasting goes, they made it out to be alot bigger than it actually was. They did give away some ginger flavored miso soup, which was weird, some japanese pancake called okonomiyaki, which was pretty good, some sushi rice sprinkled with mixed seaweed, which I just loved, a few different drinks, snacks, and desserts. But it certainly didn’t fill you up! We were hoping to make a lunch out of it. Ha. I did pick up a few things and it’s nice to know that a missing ethnic ingredient can be had only 5 minutes away. And if I ever feel the need for some yakisoba, I know where to go.
So in order to eat real lunch, we ended up at Sang Kee Asian Bistro again. I ordered the roasted pork wonton noodle. It came with some shu mei type dumplings and roasted pork. The pork was delicious. The broth itself was very bland, which I expected because it just comes in a chicken broth, but with a little hot sauce, it tastes just great. We also had a house special noodle bowl, which was much bigger, and had a little bit of everything.
On the non-soup side, we had an order of penang baked seafood fried rice. That was delicious, in a curry sauce with seafood, including scallops. It seemed like an asian paella. I’m a big fan of this, and next time I will order this. Also, the seafood pan fried noodle, which is in a ginger wine glazed sauce with big bits of seafood with crispy thin egg noodles. This is plain, but tasty. Finally, we had the beef mei fun in black pepper sauce. I expected this to be very spicy and peppery, but it actually was quite good and not heavily peppery. As usual, the service was pretty good. I also noticed that at their bar, they have little built in TVs into the bar so you can eat and watch TV. Strange.
I was actually a bit warm after walking from Aqua to the Ritz, but went with a hot noodle soup anyway. I got the Hot and Sour Seafood Noodle. It was basically like hot and sour soup, but with noodles. And instead of tofu and pork, it had seafood in it. I quite enjoyed it. But I really like hot and sour soup. If you don’t like hot and sour soup, it’s unlikely you would enjoy this. 
We also got one of the specialties – Stuffed Chinese Purple Eggplant with Shrimp. We’ve had this before and it was as delicious as ever. It is the small eggplant stuffed with shrimp, which they fry up a little bit, and then put it in a nice and mild black bean sauce. We also had some spring rolls which were also good. They were quite meaty. 
We had a short wait, surprisingly. They don’t take reservations, and it was Feb 14th after all. And with people probably not willing to drive into the city or elsewhere for a nice “romantic” dinner, we figured it would be more crowded. It was packed, but we only had about a 10 minute wait. NICE! While waiting, I had a local celebrity moment, as I spotted Denise Nakano dining with her husband. She soon left, and guess what? We got seated at the same booth! Ha!
" list. So of course, I decided to try them all. Join me for this 15-post series, as I test out each of these cocktails to see just how worthy they are.
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