Christine Z.
Yelp
I walked in and the counter attendant asked to go? (Before I had even arrived at the counter. So points for promptness.) when I answered "No," she looks startled. Then quickly came out from behind the counter and pointed to a smaller table saying "There. You will sit there." I looked at her kind of surprised and astonished, answered "Yes, sure." Taking a quick look around I noticed I was the only non-Asian person in the place, at the moment.
I ordered the hot and sour soup, Mongolian chicken with one star (after a brief awkward conversation about spice), and steamed rice.
Service was very prompt, I had tea immediately and soup right after. Had to wait a while for the teabag to steep, no worries. The hot and sour soup, however, was missing any body or underlying sweetness. It also contained some weird clear gel substance; guaranteed it's not homemade and had likely been very quickly assembled for me. The combination of the flavor and the weird gel kind of put me off so didn't really eat it.
Mongolian chicken, however was very flavorful and had a great balance of flavors. Unfortunately, missing the traditional green onions and with very few crispy rice noodles under the stirfry.
Regarding to go containers, not only do they not have compostable, when I requested something different then the two styles of Styrofoam he offered, ended up hearing about how everything else was "very expensive." Knowing full well, by the tone of the discussion that he had not investigated many options, I gently persisted that compostables were not that much more expensive and that they could charge 25¢ or 30¢ more for each dish, to cover that; and one more time, how bad Styrofoam is for the environment. But upon every attempt, he simply cut me off and repeated "too expensive."
Eventually, those things will be outlawed and it's a pity so many Asian restaurants are going to have to go through this transition the hard way.
I will probably return sometime later this year to see if a) I'm treated like less of a freak when I walk in, b) they've upped their soup game, and c) they got the message about compostable containers.