After all my reading & talking about Chinese food, we went with our friends Alice, Byron, Abby, and Peter to enjoy some of it. We all wanted hot-sour soup, which the restaurant no longer serves in large quantities, just individual servings -- so we ordered six bowls of hot-sour soup. We then had six different dishes including ma-la lamb (quite hot), eggplant dumplings (slices of eggplant stuffed with a shrimp), mango beef, a couple of seafood dishes, and house-special duck with black mushrooms. Each dish is garnished with a vegetable "flower."No chop suey. It's not on the menu. But chow mein and lo-mein are on the menu -- just in case anyone wants them, I guess. The menu has been revised quite a bit -- there's also no multi-course fixed-price menu, just a la carte items. No more "one from column A, one from column B."
We were talking about the fact that years ago there were no passable Chinese restaurants in Ann Arbor, not even close. So we had all cooked Chinese dishes with ingredients from Chinese grocery stores in Detroit or Windsor -- including our own hot-sour soup. Abby knew someone who had even made her own Peking Duck. Eventually, a restaurant called Old China opened in Ypsilanti that served good Szechuan food.
I felt the same way when I moved to Rhode Island, after years of great Chinese food in New York and Boston. Easier to cook my own than to find good food here! But slowly we have discovered a few dishes at one restaurant, and a few at another.
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