Return visit to Lucky Noodle (Hunan)

The other day I paid a return visit to Lucky Noodle on Broadway, the Hunan restaurant about which I wrote on September 4. This time I got one of the lunch specials. It was amazing, so I just had to mention it here.

This is what I got:

Boiled Sliced Fish with Pickled Veggie in Spicy Sauce ($7.95)

Look at that huge portion. They even bring out the burner to keep the pot boiling for a few minutes when it reaches your table. I would never have expected such fanciness from a cheap lunch special.

And of course, it comes with a free glass of house made soy drink. Never been a fan of soy milk, but this soy milk is truly delicious and will make a believer of soy skeptics. I really admire that they make their own soy drink. I've never heard of a Chinese restaurant doing that. It's a clear indication of the dedication to quality of this restaurant. They achieve a rare balance: quality and authenticity combined with affordability.

Anyway, back to the ... soup? It's not really a soup, more like a hot pot, but whatever.

This dish was quite spicy and the rice and soy milk helped a lot to cool down my mouth. This is a great place if you like heat!

Every element of this dish was perfect: the broth, the fish, the pickled veggies, the spiciness level, the temperature of the broth. The broth was really flavorful, the fish was fresh and tender and plentiful, and the pickled veggies were really delicious and adding a lot to the flavor of the whole. Normally in this sort of soup you'd find soggy vegetables that have no taste at all. The meal would be an unexciting slog through a mass of vegetable-shaped flavorless matter and tasteless broth, with only the meat having any taste. Here every bite of veggie adds a bit of pleasant pickled sourness to round off the flavor of the broth and the natural flavor of the fish. It makes a big difference including not regular veggies but pickled veggies. I'd even go so far as to say it makes the dish.

A sampling of the contents:

Have you ever tried using chopsticks with your left hand? Give it a try for a laugh. It's incredibly hard. It took me about a minute to grab that veggie up there and take a photo of it with chopsticks in left hand and camera in right hand.

That's the pickled veggie on the bottom. Not sure what kind of veggie it is, but it was very crunchy, like a cross between celery and cabbage. The crunch also enlivened the mouthfeel of the soup nicely by complementing the velvety softness of the fish. I was particularly intrigued by the green pepper pictured above. I'd never seen such a pepper before.

The cook here is a virtuoso at the use of a variety of kinds of capsicum to achieve different permutations of spiciness. I was able to identify no less than three types of pepper contributing to the very balanced spiciness of the broth:

The middle one is some kind of fresh chopped red pepper, the right one is some kind of dried pepper, and the one on the left the waitress informed me to be something identified on their menu as "sour pepper". Their item #33 is Stir Fried Beef with Sour Pepper. I don't know under what name this pepper is widely known in English, or what it tastes like by itself. I was too scared to take a bite out of it because my mouth was already on fire enough and I didn't have any soy milk left. The dried pepper is obviously just there for flavoring, but the chopped bits of red pepper were quite good with the fish and veggies, adding a tiny little extra kick of pleasant pepper flavor and heat to each bite.

With tip and tax added, the whole meal came out to $10 even. Pretty decent price for such a generous portion, and the food was very satiating. It's important to be satiated. You can be full without being satiated. You can be satisfied but not really satiated. The sign of a good meal is if you feel satiated - like your every taste bud is thanking you for what just happened, and your body is floating in a pleasant ether of blissful, appreciative digestion.

This meal was just as good as my first meal at Lucky Noodle. I have much more to explore on their big menu. Often I find it hard to decide whether I should gamble exploring a new restaurant or just go to a place like this that's reliable and try something new. For example before eating here I had stepped into another place on Kingsway called Wonton Mein Saga so I could have a new place to write about but immediately stepped out upon smelling the interior. It had that 'cheap Cantonese restaurant' smell and I immediately had a bad feeling about the place so I stepped out and just went to Lucky Noodle. Sometimes it's better to play it safe.