Family tested, family approved

The last restaurant I ate at during my March trip to Los Angeles elicited excited recommendations from my mom and dad - "are you going to eat the fried crabs?" they each asked when they heard I was going to meet up with my uncle, aunt, and cousin for dinner. I don't eat crabs often; one factor is that I'm too lazy to deal with the shells, but more to the point because I've never been wowed by crabmeat anyway (thus making my college years in Annapolis somewhat pointless from a culinary standpoint). So I wasn't entirely giddy at the prospect of eating at Seafood Village in Temple City, even though I knew good things had to be in store if my folks gave it not just a regular thumbs up but endorsements along the lines of "I could eat there every day!"

 My cousin Pauline did the kindness of picking me up from my extended stay hotel in Arcadia (which I commented frequently about on my Facebook account, to help keep my sense of humor intact), and we arrived fairly quickly at the restaurant, passing by the Santa Anita Race Track and taking a route similar to the one my colleagues and I used to get to the Sherriff's Department HQ. My uncle Jonathan (my dad's brother), my aunt Jenny, and my other aunt Sophie had already gotten us a table.  The place was sparsely occupied at 6pm-ish but filled up steadily over the course of our meal.

We started off with a soup course that at first had me feeling a bit worried; I could spot lots of innards floating around in the light broth and I was frankly worried about what I might encounter.  Unfortunately, I don't have the taste buds to truly appreciate a lot of what the world's diners enjoy - stuff like liver, kidney, tripe, eyeballs, etc.  In this instance, I believe I wound up with tongue, and that I can handle and I did enjoy it and the soup overall.

But the real star of the meal, of course, was the crab, deep fried with a huge heaping mass of deep fried garlic encrusting the crab itself. Yowza. No one had told me about that! I love garlic but I made a note to get myself a pack of gum before my flight, as a courtesy to my fellow airline passengers. The crab was tasty - just lightly greasy, not too salty, obviously garlicky - and it was fried to the point where I could eat some of the thinner pieces of the shell, kind of like being able to eat fishbones when you have deep fried fish in a Thai restaurant. Not being a big connoisseur of crab myself, I thought the crab meat was nice, but Pauline pointed out to me later that our crab wasn't as fresh or good as she'd had during previous visits. My relatives are sticklers for quality control!

In addition to the crab, we had several other excellent dishes, including steamed chicken with ginger sauce, scallops with sugar snap peas and other vegetables in a white sauce, fried rice made with egg whites and crab meat, and beef fried with sa cha sauce. The flavors of all the dishes were bright, clear, and distinctive. They didn't suffer from oversaucing or greasiness as you'd encounter in lots of mediocre Chinese restaurants, where the dishes just seem like blobby masses of stuff. Here the dishes worked well on their own and in combination, so we hit a good balance between spicy / emphatic and subdued / subtle flavors. My favorite dish was the beef in a spicy sa cha sauce, a condiment I find hard to describe and can't find a good description of on the internet - it is neither satay nor barbecue sauce, although it's been couched as either. Maybe a reader can provide a more accurate rendering via the comments.  The last items we had were two desserts - one provided by the house, the other ordered - tong sui soups (man, I hope I got that right) with gingko nuts and a transparent, crisp, and nearly tasteless fungus. The soups were too sweet for me to finish off completely, but I enjoyed crunching on the fungus, which I think provides some benefit to one's health other than feeling a sort of kid-like light-heartedness at the idea of eating a see-through crunchy fungus.

Seafood Village: tested, approved, and recommended by many in the Chiu clan. I'll definitely go back if I can swing it. One more reason for me to get a drivers license.

Comments

[pauline]

wow. nicely written. i think you've captured the dinner quite well. :D

i think the tong sui was on the house. the mashed taro was ordered. i also don't know how to call the sa cha sauce except for what you have written...

[alice]

I'll drive!