After a pretty lackluster first friday and major fails with the parking machines, we tried to eat at Han Dynasty. That wasn’t going to happen without a long wait, so we ended up in Chinatown at Sang Kee Peking Duck House.
H/A always like to get the mayonnaise shrimp with walnuts, so he ordered that. Well folks, let’s just say that you shouldn’t order shrimp with walnuts at a restaurant that bills itself as a duck house. We think they used panko breadcrumbs, which is just wrong for this. And instead of coming with broccoli, it came on top of a bed of shredded iceberg lettuce. It was all just weird. And the oranges tasted like they were rotten. But one highlight – the walnuts were delicious! But overall, it was pretty much a fail. I think it’s a smart thing to stick with the duck or the roast pork or something at this joint.
I ordered one of the ho fun dishes… honestly, I don’t even know which one it is. I saw some guy at another table with it and I just pointed to it and said that’s what I want. So that’s what I got. And it was hot and delicious and noodley and meaty and we ate it all. This sure beat the shrimp dish… by about a thousand shrimp. We had some major communication issues that day. We asked for a couple of bowls of rice and we got a couple of empty bowls. Then we asked for a couple of bowls of rice and we got one little bowl of rice. Oh well.

Sometimes you just want to eat some americanized chinese food but don’t want to get take-out. So we went to Beijing Homestyle in Manayunk, which is quite an attractive restaurant. It’s large too, and the dining room is swathed in blue. Blue isn’t typically the color that might jump out at you when you think chinese joint, red and yellow tend to jump in my brain. But here’s a place that has blue all over the place. There are also tons of colorful photographs along the walls. The decor appeals to me quite a bit.
The Shanghai’s Famous Soup Dumplings. These are filled with ground pork, ginger, and spring onions and are served in bamboo cages after being steamed. These are good but there wasn’t very much soup in them. In fact, some had none. And the ones that did had very little soup. But these were still good dumplings.
Here’s the orange chicken. If you like orange chicken, you’ll like this! No complaints here!
Upon the recommendation of our server, we also go the Iron Pan Short Ribs. These are extremely savory yet sweet short ribs that come out on a sizzling hot plate. This was also quite good. Both these entrees would appeal to anyone who loves americanized chinese food.
This dessert sounded interesting, so we tried these moon drop things. It was basically a mochi type sphere filled with stuff, in this case, a sweet sesame paste. It came in a brothy type liquid, which didn’t really taste like much. It was just warm. The mochi was warm and chewy, and the sweet and nutty sesame paste inside was a nice contrast with the slightly salty broth. I’ve never tasted anything like this before and quite enjoyed it. Service was good. It was a nice dine-in chinese food experience.

While chatting with B the other day, he was telling me that I had to stop by Red Kings. He’s going to be moving away from chinatown soon, so he’s going to try to get his fill of delicious and cheap chinese food before the sad departure. This place has terrible lighting. It’s yellow. They really need to fix that.
I read that they had soup dumplings so I had to try them. After loving them so much from dim sum garden, I had high hopes. These were ok, but they were no dim sum garden soup dumplings. I thoroughly prefer the dim sum garden version. But these are ok as far as dumplings go.
J was leaning towards poor menu choices again, so I encouraged him to get the roast pork with broccoli. It turned out to be a great dish with plenty of sliced char siu stir fried with fresh broccoli.
I always thought the sliced rice cakes were a korean thing, but once I realized it was also in korean food, I wanted to try it korean style. This is the sauteed rice cake with shredded pork and mustard green. The problem with this dish for me was that they didn’t mention that there were mushrooms in it. And these particular mushrooms made the entire dish taste like mushrooms, and I don’t care for mushrooms. But the rice cake and the greens were just fine. I just wish they would warn you when a dish was going to be full of mushrooms so I would not have ordered it. Boo. It would have been a thousand times better without them. Oh well, you live and learn.