Colette Pasadena 人生如戏

"Colette is helmed by former Embassy Kitchen chef Peter Lai, who showcases his innovative and complex Cantonese-inspired cuisine. One of his most sought-after off-menu items is the Crispy Flower Chicken, a traditional Cantonese dish that takes at least six hours to prepare and features a deboned, air-dried chicken pressed with shrimp paste. Colette offers a variety of rare and unadvertised dishes, including stir-fried lobster sticky rice, lamb stew, and winter melon soup. The off-menu Dungeness crab curry is served with pan-fried vermicelli that soaks up the curry’s flavor, while Lai’s spin on geoduck two ways includes a classic sashimi preparation and a less traditional porridge (pao fan). Beloved dishes like beef chow fun, cola-glazed chicken wings, and salmon carpaccio are also on the menu." - Kristie Hang

"The upscale Cantonese dishes at Colette, a strip mall dinner destination right on the Pasadena/Arcadia border, somehow manage to be familiar and novel at once. There’s crackly chicken skin stuffed with spongy shrimp paste, saucy beef bits under a crispy vermicelli noodle pancake, and stir-fried chayote tossed in a medley of minced pork and pickled olives. After serving American brunch classics for years, the restaurant brought on a new chef to run dinner service in 2022. Colette 2.0 is a huge upgrade—there’s solid dim sum on the daytime menu, but dinner is the real highlight. That’s when you can cover a big round table in creative Cantonese dishes as tasty as any you’ll find in the SGV. Bring friends so you try as much as possible. " - brant cox, sylvio martins, nikko duren

"Reserve a table at Colette in Hastings Ranch for a taste of expert Cantonese cooking from chef Peter Lai. The crispy chicken stuffed with shrimp paste is a must-order for every table, along with the stir-fried lobster with sticky rice if appetites and wallets allow. Be sure to pre-order these labor-intensive dishes beforehand to avoid disappointment. — Cathy Chaplin, senior editor" - Cathy Chaplin, Mona Holmes

"Chef Peter Lai, formerly of Embassy Kitchen in San Gabriel, is bringing LA’s Chinese food connoisseurs to an unexpected strip mall in East Pasadena. The chef’s menu at Colette includes classic Cantonese dishes along with new-school takes that draw from pan-Asian flavors and traditions. On a visit for a friend’s birthday, the array of dishes included sauteed chayote with minced pork and pickled olives, beef chow fun, crispy chicken with shrimp paste, and lobster with sticky rice. While the stir-fried noodles dazzled with the deep essence of wok hei and the crispy chicken was as good as ever, it was the perfectly cooked lobster combined with sausage-studded sticky rice that proved most enticing. Bringing together two quintessential Cantonese dishes on one feast-worthy platter is the kind of unexpected move that keeps diners coming back to Colette. — Cathy Chaplin, senior editor" - Eater Staff

"Chef Peter Lai’s Cantonese menu is one of LA’s most innovative and his line of dim sum includes tasty siu mai, traditional xiao long bao, and jumbo-sized har gow." - Mona Holmes, Eater Staff