Restaurant Review
Jan. 22nd, 2005 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomikritzerOur friend ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
allochthon babysat tonight and Ed and I went out to dinner. By ourselves. With no impatient four-year-old to keep amused while we waited for our table, and no antsy one-year-old to try to keep happy in a high chair. It is so much more relaxing to go out to eat without the kids. With the kids, it's really much more relaxing to just eat at home. Molly is actually very good in restaurants, but Kiera is not. I trust that she will be more willing to sit still as she gets older, just as Molly did, but at 16 months, no.
We went to a restaurant way out in the suburbs, a place in Plymouth called Tea House. It's in a strip mall just off of Betty Crocker Way (yes, we have a Betty Crocker Way, which intersects, I think, with General Mills Drive). As someone who lives in the actual city of Minneapolis, I tend to be something of a snot about the ethnic food available in the suburbs, but the fact is that some of the best Asian food in the metro area is in the suburbs -- you just have to know where to look. I've heard there's a really excellent Indian restaurant in the northwest suburbs somewhere, and a really good Korean place in (I think) Eagan. And I've eaten dim sum several times at My Le Hoa in Little Canada, which does some of the best dim sum in the Cities. (Which is still nowhere near as good as the dim sum we had at the airport when we were waiting for our flight out of Hong Kong. And not even in the same category as the best dim sum we had in Hong Kong. But I digress.)
Anyway, Tea House has a standard menu with the same stuff every other Chinese restaurant in the Twin Cities makes, but they also have a special menu of Szechuan dishes, and it's for the Szechuan specialties that we went. Ed and I are devoted readers of Dara Moskowitz's restaurant column in the City Pages; she loved Tea House and she had some specific recommendations, so we mostly ordered the dishes she suggested. Cucumbers in sauce, dan dan noodles, and bamboo in something or other, all off the appetizers part of the menu; we also got a lamb dish. It was a busy night, so the waiter just put in our order and brought stuff to our table as it was ready, rather than trying to do an appetizers course and then an entree.
The food was all quite spicy. Manageable -- I don't have a tremendous tolerance for heat (though I tend to tolerate Asian hot better than Mexican hot) -- but very spicy. The first thing to arrive was the cucumbers. They were stir fried (I think) and hot, in a chile sauce. Very tasty, and also very different -- I had never had this dish before, or anything like it. Next came the dan dan noodles, and let me just note, the next time we go to this restaurant, I am getting my own bowl of these. They were really, really good. Then came the lamb, which had been simmered in this fiery hot chile broth. And last came the bamboo, which was okay -- it was fresh bamboo, not canned -- but not something I think I would necessarily order again. (As opposed to those noodles.) All the dishes were hot, but they all tasted distinctly different.
It's a very family-friendly restaurant so we may go again, take the girls, and just order for them off the regular menu. Molly loves Chinese food, but she has no tolerance for heat.
allochthon babysat tonight and Ed and I went out to dinner. By ourselves. With no impatient four-year-old to keep amused while we waited for our table, and no antsy one-year-old to try to keep happy in a high chair. It is so much more relaxing to go out to eat without the kids. With the kids, it's really much more relaxing to just eat at home. Molly is actually very good in restaurants, but Kiera is not. I trust that she will be more willing to sit still as she gets older, just as Molly did, but at 16 months, no. We went to a restaurant way out in the suburbs, a place in Plymouth called Tea House. It's in a strip mall just off of Betty Crocker Way (yes, we have a Betty Crocker Way, which intersects, I think, with General Mills Drive). As someone who lives in the actual city of Minneapolis, I tend to be something of a snot about the ethnic food available in the suburbs, but the fact is that some of the best Asian food in the metro area is in the suburbs -- you just have to know where to look. I've heard there's a really excellent Indian restaurant in the northwest suburbs somewhere, and a really good Korean place in (I think) Eagan. And I've eaten dim sum several times at My Le Hoa in Little Canada, which does some of the best dim sum in the Cities. (Which is still nowhere near as good as the dim sum we had at the airport when we were waiting for our flight out of Hong Kong. And not even in the same category as the best dim sum we had in Hong Kong. But I digress.)
Anyway, Tea House has a standard menu with the same stuff every other Chinese restaurant in the Twin Cities makes, but they also have a special menu of Szechuan dishes, and it's for the Szechuan specialties that we went. Ed and I are devoted readers of Dara Moskowitz's restaurant column in the City Pages; she loved Tea House and she had some specific recommendations, so we mostly ordered the dishes she suggested. Cucumbers in sauce, dan dan noodles, and bamboo in something or other, all off the appetizers part of the menu; we also got a lamb dish. It was a busy night, so the waiter just put in our order and brought stuff to our table as it was ready, rather than trying to do an appetizers course and then an entree.
The food was all quite spicy. Manageable -- I don't have a tremendous tolerance for heat (though I tend to tolerate Asian hot better than Mexican hot) -- but very spicy. The first thing to arrive was the cucumbers. They were stir fried (I think) and hot, in a chile sauce. Very tasty, and also very different -- I had never had this dish before, or anything like it. Next came the dan dan noodles, and let me just note, the next time we go to this restaurant, I am getting my own bowl of these. They were really, really good. Then came the lamb, which had been simmered in this fiery hot chile broth. And last came the bamboo, which was okay -- it was fresh bamboo, not canned -- but not something I think I would necessarily order again. (As opposed to those noodles.) All the dishes were hot, but they all tasted distinctly different.
It's a very family-friendly restaurant so we may go again, take the girls, and just order for them off the regular menu. Molly loves Chinese food, but she has no tolerance for heat.
