My friends and I, who all used to frequent this restaurant, dined there last week after a year or so hiatus. It was not the Chinatown we had come to love over the years. Our dining experience got off on the wrong foot when we...were "greeted" by a surly hostess, who demanded we take a seat in the waiting area until the fifth and last member of our party arrived.
Once seated and handed our menus, we knew the restaurant had undergone a major change. The once extensive selection of Cantonese, Hunan and Szechuan selections had been seriously narrowed down while sushi, sashimi, makimono, Japanese and other Asian dishes predominated.
Nevertheless, we tried to stick with our old favorites and ordered what we could find that was left of them, including house lo mein, house fried rice, lobster sauce, sesame shrimp, pan seared shrimp (a menu item new to us that was listed as accompanied by asparagus but came with pea pods), pork tenderloin with ginger and scallion, and chicken with pea pods. Both the "house" rice and lo mein were anything but worthy of the title. The shrimp were half the size we had been accustomed to at Chinatown and so over cooked they arrived hard as rocks. Continuing our selection disappointment, the pieces of pork tenderloin were so tough it was impossible to believe they had been cut from a real pork tenderloin and were barely edible.
Don't know what happened, but while the "old" Chinatown used to serve the freshest vegetables, the most tender cuts of meat and extra large, perfectly cooked shrimp, all in finger-licking delicious sauces, this new incarnation lacks all those attributes, and sad to say not one of our party of five ever plans to go back.More