midnight snack

small eats from the local korean market (DB MARKET WORLD, 21080 Golden Spring Dr, Diamond Bar, CA) and leftovers from a chinese feast with the Magic Guys (as in, the Magic the Gathering). clockwise from the upper left corner: sichuan style spicy stirfried green beans, korean sesame marinated bean sprouts, korean spicy squid, peppersalt fried cod pieces ;)

so the story about the chinese feast. in the food court of a plaza on colima and nogales (fullerton?) across from the HK supermarket... there's this not-quite restuarant not-quite fast food place that serves a lot of cantonese style food among other things. it's like a big mishmash of popular dishes. they have this great deal where you can get 3 dishes for 10.99 (at dinner!) and if you order 6 dishes, you get a tureen of complimentary soup of the day. all this stuff is family style and includes the bottomless bucket of rice that's present in a lot of southern chinese restuarants in america. note that this isn't necessarily the case everywhere as some restaurants have less wasteful carts filled with rice from which servers will dole out a bowl at a time. this style is prevalent in higher class places and was quite common in HK. anyway, the 5 us us ordered peppersalt fried rock cod, spicy stirfried geen beans, a braised vegetarian dish containing tofu beancurd and cabbage, snap peas and shrimp in a garlic sauce, and i can't quite remember the last two... i think one was a leafy green called "hollow heart vegetable" stirfried in a fermented beancurd sauce, and.. yeah, can't remember it. must not have been a tasty one. i'll fill in the chinese names for them soon when i figure out how to use the language input for windows.

i think we walked out of there completely stuffed and with leftovers for a little over $26. this meal was immensely more satisfying than lunch that day at the cheesecake factory which really isn't that good and a bit overpriced. 3 people ran a bill over $55 for two entrees and a few extras! my friend ordered a "pad thai linguine" which came out to be a pasta dish in a goopy peanut flavored sauce. no bean sprouts, fresh herbs, chillis, tomatoes, lime, any type of bite at all. just an insipid attempt at fusion food. the buffalo chicken blazers(?) tasted neither like chicken, nor spicy hot sauce and they had this weird mushy consistency b/c the meat was blended with the sauce before being formed into patties. it tasted like something from a tv dinner. some of the celery that came with that still had mud on it. i'd expect that from a hole in the wall or a cheap eats place, but not from there! the tiramisu cheese cake was pretty good. seeing as it's the cheesecake factory, they'd at least get that right. yeah, ok, you get a lot of food.. but for the quality, it's not worth it. bling is not better. too cruddy to be anything but a standard chain restaurant. yeah, that place has a big X from me.