Mary T.
Yelp
My rating is 3.5 stars.
I wanted to get together with a dear friend. We both worked together in Rochester. She still works at the same place. She lives in northern Iowa. I was staying in Eden Prairie. Rochester was our midpoint.
We originally wanted to meet on a Monday. With our luck, I was caught in a snowstorm and road conditions were horrible. We decided to change it to the following day, which was new year's eve.
Hunan Garden has been around for decades. It was my first time here.
When I lived in Rochester, I rarely ordered Chinese food. My thinking was that I made Chinese food often that I didn't need to get any. Instead, I focused on other cuisines while I was here.
I asked my friend for suggestions. She recommended this place. I was game.
This restaurant is in a plaza. There are lots of parking spots. I parked and walked in.
It felt like an all-female staff. The woman greeting me showed me to a nice table. I indicated that I was waiting for a friend. Glasses of water and menus came from another woman. A third woman, who seemed older, was curious about my background. It didn't surprise me. It happens to me all the time when I travel. She asked where I was from. I said that I used to live in Rochester, but moved back to the Toronto area.
My friend had finally arrived. She saved me from staff interrogation about my background. Whew!
We caught up with our lives while trying to decide what to order. My friend has come here multiple times. She recommended the princess chicken. She let me know that the brown sauce was amazing. She also said that she would "dumb the spice level down" because I'm here and, by default, this place thinks that she can handle spicy foods when next to a Chinese person... funny!
This place has a great lunch special. For $9.25, you order a main dish. It comes with your choice of egg drop or spicy sour soup. The meal also comes with an egg roll and fried rice. The catch is that you need two people ordering the special. We were good.
We both ordered the princess chicken. I had ordered a Diet Coke before my friend had arrived at the restaurant. We both got water by default.
Our spicy sour soup and egg roll came first. The spicy sour soup was good. It had great flavour. I polished it off fast.
The egg roll was huge. I mean massive! It was stuffed full of veggies. It was probably the largest egg roll that I have consumed in my life. Yum!
Our princess chicken and fried rice came out. We got a huge bowl of fried rice. Our server said that if we needed more rice, to just let her know.
The princess chicken was delicious. The chicken was tender. The sauce was flavourful with a bit of spicy heat. I swear that there must have been an onion sale happening. I felt like at least one whole onion was diced up in this dish.
The downside? The fried rice. It didn't taste like fried rice. It was essentially steamed rice with soy sauce mixed in. Where are the small peas and carrots? You had so many onions in the princess chicken. Couldn't you have put some of that in the fried rice? Fried rice should have some sort of green or regular onion in it. Maybe some egg? Nothing. It was not fried rice. Perhaps it was an Americanized version. Anyway, it was a huge disappointment that I ended up eating my princess chicken without the rice.
Our bill came. My friend immediately grabbed it and wouldn't let me pay.
"May I at least help pay the tip?" I asked her.
"You may certainly not," she said.
"Well, I got you a gift because I knew that this situation would happen," I said.
Yes, I got her a tin of assorted cookies from Felix and Norton. My friend opened up the tin and immediately had a cookie. She loved it. Her reaction made my day.
We both used the women's washroom before we left. It was clean. It has two stalls.
The food here is pretty good. If it fixes the fried rice issue, I'd rate it higher. Otherwise, I'd come back and give more dishes a try.
(15)
