Jin hai/Beijing pie house pre made dumplings 35 bucks a bag. Lamb and pork so juicy! Guo tie style
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Do those other cities have a bigger HK expat community?
Yeah, they’re caught in the middle. They don’t have enough foot traffic to allow for lax margins on food stock. Also, because they want to offer such a broad selection, some of the soups are kept on a rotation. I do admire what they’re trying to do.
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Wechat Cafe This is the type of HK Cafe you would find in a Hong Kong residential area—sort of an “anti-Maxim’s.” The dishes we had were very good, and the menu are interesting enough to make us want to go back soon.
Minced pork and fermented squid: Very good flavor; the hand-slapped patty has a very bouncy texture.
Baked Pork Chop with rice: While not perfect, I have been looking for this quality for a very long time. The sauce has its classic flavor, but the standout is the pork chop itself. The prep is Japanese tonkatsu style using pork loin, so it’s tender and juicy. A lot of restaurants use cheaper cuts that yield too much fat. Choose the fried rice base and ask them for more wok hei, as I felt that was lacking—but YMMV.
Ipoh Kopitiam Curry fish balls and Ipoh-style fried egg noodles. Both were good.
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Quite possibly. With the Bay Area it’s confusing with their dim sum so much better yet their Hong Kong cafe scene lags the San Gabriel Valley.
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Hmmm… Wonder if there’s more of a market in SF for upscale dim sum, whereas maybe the population in LA wants more “down home” (eg., afforable) HK-style food?
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Tons more Chinese banquet facilities up there too. The Cantonese banquet business has been dying down here for years. Up there they keep building bigger and bigger ones. Biggest Cantonese restaurant in the US opened last fall in Castro Valley (!!!) in a former CVS store. And banquet halls go hand in hand with dim sum.
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Hm! I’ve only ever seen guo tie as long and open-ended.
This place is down the street from my badminton club and I always wonder if it’s worth a visit (beyond the name, obviously). Thanks!
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A De Luo Si Fen replaces Zui Xiang Yuan in Alhambra’s Valley Square. Stinky sea snail broth noodle soup is back! (That’s the only thing they serve.)
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Omg that sucks.
The space that was Zui Xiang Yuan was one of my childhood restaurants. I think it used to be Ban Mu Yuan. Original A&J??? I hope the new place kept that picture on the wall. I used to stare at it while waiting for my beef noodles, scallion pancakes, and pork chop rice with sour plum drink.
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Previous tenants in that space were Flavor Garden, A&J and A&E.
Boy do I miss the Flavor Garden egg and chive pockets.
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so sad flavor garden/ zui xiang yuan is gone. we had CH lunch there with a couple of the CH website folk over a decade ago.
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IIRC zui xiang yuan is flavor garden in chinese; that mall required every business to use a chinese name so they simply renamed the place.
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Yes!! The pork ribs with glutenous rice was the move.
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their fish dumplings were awfully good too
but they also had a hot & sour noodle soup that was the bomb.
and of course, those chive pockets
and their beef roll was WAY better
and if i didn’t want to go to BPH
i think i’m going to cry…
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