Hannah E.
Yelp
No matter what I say here, this restaurant will continue to succeed and thrive and be really ridiculously busy at 3pm on a Sunday. Like to the point of creating traffic on the roads for an entire block radius busy. Like people spilling out the door and pushing each other just to get a glimpse of the inside busy.
We arrived at 2, which was luckily just ahead of the crowd, and were seated near a window in the back and presented with huge illustrated menus full of what looked to my untrained eye like fancy Americanized Chinese food. I'd been told, though, and read articles to the same effect, that this was MEXICANIZED Chinese food and thus wholly different!
I don't know. My salt-pepper squid and asparagus was nicely fried and tenderly textured (both things - the squid and the asparagus) and was an addictive dish, with the tiny pieces so easy to pop into my mouth - but eventually the salt just took over and the whole thing ended up giving me a headache. The free cookies at the end are lifesavers, since they soak up all the oil and salt. They're shaped like sugar cookies but taste just like fortune cookies!
Maybe my palate isn't sophisticated enough to detect a difference between a Mexican-Cantonese fusion and an American-Cantonese fusion, but my dish and my companion's tofu-mushroom-in-brown-sauce dish just seemed like things we could get at any old school Cantonese restaurant that's been around for decades and is used to serving Americans who don't want to get too outside their comfort zones. I fully recognize that trying two dishes on a hundred-item menu is not enough fodder to make this claim, however.