Grand Sichuan House

Grand Sichuan House
(718)680-8887

8701 5th Ave, Brooklyn 11209 between 87th and 88th street


Okay, this place completely rocks when you actually eat there. They have an astonishingly "authentic" Chinese menu, I call it authentic because it's mostly made up of crazy shit I've never heard of. When you are there, read the reviews on the walls - they won't steer you wrong. Actually, they do - avoid the hot shrimp dumplings, they are unremarkable.

You need to seek out the "chicken and hot pepper" mess, it's a mass of little bits of chicken hidden in a pile of dried hot peppers. It's an Easter egg hunt, digging around in the peppers for bits of chicken. Concealed amongst the giant peppers are little tiny nuggetty peppers that aren't hot, but cah-razy weird in your mouth. They make the mouth vibrate, a vigorous buzzing that doesn't hurt but is rather exciting. It's hard to beat.

They also have a dried beef dish that can either be curried or not. Don't miss it. Their General Tso chicken is good, too. Not too hot, not too sweet, and really really cheap.


Anyways, this site is more about delivery dishes, so:

Eggplant with Garlic Sauce - This was so much better than I'd ever expected. Big two inch chunks of egg plant in a thin sauce vaguely reminiscent of General Tso's. Sweet and savory and eggplanty, just right mixed 50/50 in the rice.

Vegetable Mai Fun - A non-greasy noodle dish. Tiny bits of vegetables, mostly noodles. Not bad.

Twice Cooked Pork - A sore disappointment. Big slices of fatty pork that tasted like the Chinese barbecue crap I hate so much. Avoid.

Mystery seafood dish - A very good seafood dish we didn't order. Fall apart bits of white fish, all sorts of goodness. I'll never find it again.

All Happy Chinese Restaurant

All Happy Chinese Restaurant
8706 5th Avenue
(718)921-5252


Technically, my order was a delivery. I picked it up and took it home, so it's delivery enough for this blog. Anyways, this blog is really about me reminding myself what I do and don't like about certain restaurants, so this is important.

I ordered a lunch order of General Tso's Chicken, and asked for it extra crispy as I always do. General Tso's can be the best thing on the menu or inedible jelly, it's totally the luck of the draw and the number one factor I use when judging a Chinese restaurant. Not, mind you, that their General Tso's is indicative of the rest of their menu. Quite a few restaurants have marvelous selections and have tacked on General Tso's as a necessary evil - something they aren't really invested in but know fat guys like me are sure to order.

For whatever reason, All Happy gave me some really awful General Tso's Chicken. Instead of extra crispy it was extra burned tasting, but STILL not crispy. It fell on the gelatin side of things, with the breading sliding off like a wet scab. The sauce was awful, too.

So that's it. If you are in the area, go across the street to the falafel cart or Grand Szechuan.

Las Margaritas

Las Margaritas
(718)238-7630

Ordered:

Pork chimichanga
Vegetarian tostadas

Well, this order was pretty awful start to finish. The vegetarian tostadas were described as "all right" by my wife. They had radishes on them, and big slices of raw onion, both things I appreciate in Mexican food.

What I can speak about from personal experience, however, is the pork chimichanga. It was pretty bad. The deep fried chimichanga had been covered in some sort of baked on sauce and cheese. That, combined with the trip in an enclosed tin container, made most of the fried skin of the thing turn into something like a wet scab. Bleah. The fried bits had a almost chemical taste, not like poison but not at all good.

The meat inside had that slightly off taste of organ meat, along with a texture to match. Such a disappointment.

A real disappointment.

King Falafel

I take a strange pleasure in being given pita bread in the bag
they bought the stuff in. It makes me feel that
the cook is a real person too.

King Falafel
(718)745-4188

Ordered:

Lamb Schwarma Sandwich
Cauliflower Wrap, warm
Mugarah
Yogurt Salad

King Falafel is really good. A reasonable delivery time, forty minutes on a Saturday night. Pleasant person on the phone to take my order, friendly and helpful. The delivery person shorted me a dollar, not in a sneaky way but in a blank stare way. I couldn't bring myself to argue with him as he didn't seem to speak any English, I just gave up and let him pad his tip.

Bah.

Anyways, the actual food was good. The lamb was juicy and perfect, charred lightly on the outside and wrapped in a soft, oversized pita. Really, really wonderful.

The cauliflower wrap was very good, too. My wife loved it, I had a few bites and approved, though I found something in it a little bitter. The only bad thing about the wrap was my wife picking out sizable tomato chunks that were too hard to eat. But it tasted great.

The mugarah wasn't my cup of tea, though my wife seemed to like it. It was atypical of what the stuff normally is like, regardless. The yogurt salad was about as good as it could be, with long strips of cucumber in it, and I think a few pieces of celery.

All in all, this is the best middle-eastern I've had in Bay Ridge.

Szechuan Delight

Szechuan Delight
(718)836-2383

Ordered:

Dragon and Phoenix
Mu Shu Vegetables
Vegetable Roll
Crab Rangoon

When the bag was delivered, it weighed a ton because the restaurant threw in a free 2 liter of Pepsi. Very nice. The food also took fifty-eight minutes from phone call to delivery, not so nice. On the plus side, they didn't throw in ass-loads of plastic eating utensils, on the bad end that shiny silver bag with the rangoon in it. Wasteful.

The Dragon and Phoenix is a side-by-side plate of General Tso's chicken and a mix of General Tso's seafood. I've had this from other Bay Ridge restaurants and loved it, here not so much. It's edible but it's not good. There are lots of ways to make the venerable General's chicken, this isn't the worst method but it isn't the best. It's a dark brown batter without any crunch at all, a thin brown sauce. The chicken chunks are generous and not bad, but I'd never order this again.

GT chicken is supposed to be crunch and sweet, almost a sweet and sour sauce with spice. This ain't that.

The seafood portion was better than the chicken, but more mixed in quality. I had one large shrimp in the mixture that was so tough as to be inedible, tough and fishy tasting, very stringy. I was too scared of it to finish it, and I am nervous about the portion I ate. Otherwise the seafood was pretty good.

The Mu Shu vegetables I would call inedible. They smelled and tasted sweet in a way reminiscent of spoiled food. My wife turned her nose up at it, I did too after a few bites. I might dip back into this tomorrow, as left overs, but I doubt it. (edit: I didn't.)

The vegetable roll was okay, nothing special.

Look delicious, eh?

The crab rangoon left me with mixed emotions. They look hand made, if they aren't then they are a different sort than one normally finds in NYC chinese restaurants. They looked beautiful, but they suffered badly from the trip. The rangoon were chewy and greasy, still good but not great.

The shining joy of this delivery was the mustard. Real chinese restaurant mustard. Spicy and great. In New York I always am given crap mustard with the appearance of melted plastic, this was rough and textury and hot as fuck. Wonderful, wonderful mustard.

Sadly, I will never order from here again. Mustard gained and lost.

Follow up: I had a nervous stomach after the meal, took it about an hour to even out. I suspect the seafood or the sour smelling vegetables.

The Chip Shop - OUT OF BUSINESS

The Chip Shop is one of my favorite restaurants in NYC. Great food, nice ambiance. I get to drink Britishy drinks as fodder for my other blog. Better yet, everybody else feels the same way so we can always agree on the Chip Shop.

Chip Shop! Chip Shop! Chip Shop!

Chip Shop, you hold the strings to my heart, and you gave them a good yank when I tried your delivery.

Ordered:

Cod and Chips
Plowman's Lunch
Deep fried Twinkie

I knew things weren't going well when I unfolded the paper around my fish and the batter came off. All of it. I don't think there was a single bit of fried goodness stuck to my fish after I unwrapped it. My sobs echoed around our large, Bay Ridge living room. Alas. Scraping the goo off the paper didn't give me back any of the fried goodness. It was all mush. Everything about my fried fish that was "fried" and not "fish" had turned into gelatin and stuck to the white wrapping paper. It was like unwrapping a burn victim.

That sucks.

The french fried fared the same as almost all delivery fries. Mushy and gross. More like a big potato lump than little individual bits of goodness. That sucks too, but it's expected.

My wife got the plowman's lunch, I can't quite remember what was in it except that the pickle was missing. I think it was a salad and some cheese, no pickle. My wife likes pickles, this made us sad.

I was resigned to the worst when I had the Twinkie, only to be completely taken by surprise. It was delicious. I always eat the deep fried Twinkies for desert, and this was the best I'd ever had. It was like a sugar coated handjob, liberally slathered in berry sauce, where the creamy filling wasn't bitter and salty. The incredibleness of the Twinkie almost made up for the failure of the rest of the meal.

A favorite in person, not so hot at home.

EDIT: OUT OF BUSINESS

Bay Ridge Kebab House

Bay Ridge Kebab House
(718)238-8866

On the menu cover it says:

People Will Forget What You Said
People Will Forget What You Did
But People Will Never Forget What You Made Them Feel

I wonder what gravestone they stole that little number off of.




Ordered:

Lamb Gyro
Chicken Gyro
Babagonush

The food arrived lukewarm, not unreasonable considering it was thirty degrees out, but very unfortunate. Actually, yes, it is unreasonable for the food to arrive cold. This is delivery folks, you gotta deliver.

The lamb gyro was one of the worst I've ever had. The lamb was dried out, not greasy at all. It had a gross, grainy texture that is hard to explain - more like inferior falafel than lamb. It's sad that a poor little lamb was struck down, only only to be ground into something this undelicious.

The chicken was slightly better, if only because it wasn't ground up. Cold chicken is still good. The first bite I had of the chicken had something hard and gristly in it, the rest was better in texture. The chicken, for the record, was white - my experience with the stuff cut off the big schwarma rolls usually has it brown. Something different, not necessarily bad.

The pita wrap for both was greasy and dried out, you know exactly what I mean - it was stiff and almost translucent, the grease having sunk into the pita. It was a very thin pita, too. I'm not sure if you'd ever call it a pita. I don't mean that in an insulting way, but I'm just theorizing that maybe this is something of a regional variant. A pansified wrap instead of an honest pita.

I liked the babagonush, my wife didn't. We both agreed it was much creamier than what we're used to, something I sort of liked. The bitter eggplant taste wasn't that strong, either. Another plus in my book. It had that sort of smokey eggplant taste, but smothered in creaminess. Eh.

The best part of this meal was the bread accompanying the babagonush. It was a half a bread round, about an inch and half thick, with a shiny crust on both sides. Good and bready and crusty, I wish I could get just htis stuff delivered. Swilled around in the babagonush it was great.