The Best Chinese Restaurants in Southern California
The five best Chinese Restaurants in Southern California according to NYTimes' Mark Bittman. His favorite out of the bunch is Triumphal Palace:
Six of us — one of whom now claims she will be married here — shared 24 dishes (about 18 of which came within 10 minutes), and while all except the predictably sad desserts were good, some were incredible. These were barbecue pork belly, firm cubes of slow-cooked, crunchy-skinned fresh bacon that, I swear, were a dead-on replica of a dish Alain Ducasse used to serve at about five times the price; Chiu Chow-style dumplings, with thick, chewy, slightly crisp rice-flour exteriors filled with (could it be?) jasmine-scented meat; deep-fried carrot cake, in fact a savory-sweet custard-filled dumpling; boiled baby bok choy in fish stock, which, like the duck I’d had at dinner, contained some secret ingredient that was the Bomb; and a wonderful layered creation of pan-fried sticky rice with egg.
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2 Comments:
Serendipitously, I happened to have dinner at Triumphal Palace last night and then came across this review today. Based on my dinner, I was surprised at the reviewer's enthusiasm. (Perhaps dim sum is the better time to go). The one thing we had that was excellent was a steamed whole tilapia; but the filet magnon with black pepper was quite greasy, and the the Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce was utterly forgettable. The roast pork appetizer was quite tasty, but also didn't make you forget you were eating a hunk of fatty pig, the way that a more imaginative treatment might have.
We were attracted to the restaurant by Jonathan Gold's rave in the L.A. Weekly (which focusses on the hard-to-find offering of roast suckling pig http://www.laweekly.com/index.php?option=com_lsd&task=food&attr=Chinese&Itemid=110), but I would play up his caveats about some of the dinner offerings as "kind of dull."
Would love to hear about some better experiences people have had at Triumphal Palace. I didn't think the place was bad -- it just didn't make me think "incredible," nuptials-worthy, Ducasse-like, or even quite worth our 45 minute drive.
Andgeleno at 8:31PM on 12/03/06
At the risk of revealing my functional levels of OCD, I just wanted to report that I went to Triumphal Palace a second time, this time with a large party, and we ordered the specialty, the suckling pig. There was a real novelty to having a whole sucklig pig, but honestly, once again I was underwhelmed by the food. Really nothing special. I kind of feel that with positive reviews in the LAT, the NYT, and the LA Weekly, Triumphal Palace has become the restaurant equivalent of Mischa Barton: everyone's heard of it, but who knows why?
Andgeleno at 10:02PM on 12/12/06