Restaurant: Boston Lobster
Location: 727 E Valley Blvd, San Gabriel, CA 91776. (626) 288-4388
Date: November 9, 2015
Cuisine: Cantonese etc
Rating: Great Chinese
A perennial San Gabriel favorite is Newport Seafood, a large, crowded, high end Cantonese (with a bit of Southeast Asian) joint. Well, at some point a group of employees from there split off and opened their own “spin off” restaurant, Boston Lobster.
Boston Lobster isn’t as large or built out as Newport, but it does offer up very similar fare in a great location with much less of a wait.
2005 Alain Thienot Champagne Brut. VM 90. Bright yellow. Fresh orange and pear aromas are complicated by chamomile, honey, herbs and fresh porcini. Sappy and expansive on the palate, offering intense orchard fruit flavors braced by gentle acidity. A smoky, leesy nuance lingers on the long, supple finish. Drinking well now and showing good complexity.
Peanuts and cashews on the table.
Crunch, spicy cucumbers. A typical cold starter.
From my cellar: 2005 Morey-Blanc Corton-Charlemagne. Burghound 94. More evident wood with hints of spice and vanilla frames the green fruit and spiced apple aromas and a trace of it can also be found on the full-bore, rich and intense big-bodied flavors blessed with excellent concentration and muscle, all wrapped in a minerally, delicious and serious finish of superb length.
The house special lobster with noodles. This is basically a lightly garlic fried lobster and it was as awesome as this rather excellent dish gets. There was lots of easily accessible big chunks of meat and the crispy garlic bits were amazing.
Under the big guy was a big pile of noodles to soak up the garlicky sauce. Yum!
Arnie brought: 2009 Sea Smoke Pinot Noir Southing. VM 91. Sea Smoke’s 2009 Pinot Noir Southing is gorgeous. It possesses striking textural depth and finesse. Juicy dark cherries, licorice, spices and flowers take shape beautifully as the wine fleshes out in the glass. The finish turns a bit fleeting as floral elements become more pronounced, but this is still a very pretty, nuanced Pinot.
agavin: not bad for a new world pinot. Relatively mellow and unoaked (which is a good thing)
Special order duck. We asked them if there was duck on the menu, and they said only by special order. We hadn’t, so we left it at that. Well, apparently special can be really fast because on of the Boston Lobster guys ran out somewhere and came back with this delicious roast duck. It was huge, meaty, and very tender and juicy. We have no idea where it came from.
2007 Dönnhoff Kreuznacher Krötenpfuhl Riesling Spätlese. JG 92. A solid middle sweet Riesling.
Crab in curry sauce. The crab itself was tasty, although slightly hard to get at the meat. The sauce though was amazing. Just a tiny bit spicy, with a sort of Singaporean curry vibe, it was incredible over rice. We almost licked the plate clean.
2012 Château de Puligny-Montrachet Chassagne-Montrachet. BH 87-89. Here too the sulfur addition is sufficiently strong to dominate the underlying fruit. The middle weight flavors also possess good volume and concentration though not quite the same degree of complexity though I like the clean mouth feel on the mildly austere finale.
agavin: Tasted mostly like reduction at this stage.
Fried sea trout with garlic sweet and sour. This is the front half of the fish (the back half is below). The sauce smelled rather funky with a strong fish sauce smell, but it tasted great. Tons of good garlicky flavor. They love garlic here, and so do I.
The tail was much more boring, steamed with ginger.
2011 Bodegas Muga Rioja Reserva Unfiltered. agavin 86. Too young and barnyardy.
Sizzling hot plate beef. Tasty, but a touch chewy.
Yarom brought: 1970 Pierre Damoy Chambertin-Clos de Bèze. agavin 75. As much as I’d love to like a 45 year old Beze, this one was cloudy, brown, and about 80% of the way toward making a nice salad dressing. It did, however, still have a characteristic Beze terroir signature.
Kung pao chicken. Not spicy like the real Szechuan version, but very tasty none-the-less.
Shrimp with garlic sauce. More garlic. Yes!
2012 Justin Vineyards & Winery Justification. VM 90. Glass-staining ruby. Complex, seductively perfumed aromas of cherry, cassis, pipe tobacco and potpourri, along with a smoky topnote. Juicy, spicy and penetrating, showing very good clarity to its dark berry, bitter cherry and floral pastille flavors. The intense, clinging, smoke-tinged finish shows a hint of floral pastilles and suave, slow-building tannins.
Fried pork chops. And even more garlic. These were hot, fatty, boneless, and super delicious. So garlicky good.
Seafood chow mein. There wasn’t that much seafood but once the sauce soaked through the crispy noodles it was awesome.
Yam leaves. Apparently this is a typical Malaysian home dish: yam leaves sautéed with garlic (surprise!). They were a rather nice colon sweeper.
Mixed fried rice. A nice example.
Warren brought: 2001 Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey. VM 93. Pale yellow-gold. Orange peel, quince, honey and sexy oak tones of vanilla and spice. Chewy and powerful in the mouth, with highly concentrated flavors of creme caramel, honey and exotic spices. Finishes very long, honeyed and powerful, not to mention flamboyantly aromatic.
agavin: I don’t think this bottle was well stored. It was alcoholic on the palette, and certainly advanced, but kind of hit the spot at the time.
Seasonal pumpkin soup for dessert. A sweet soup with big nutty tapioca balls. Not bad for a Chinese dessert.
I was skeptical going into dinner because I tend to prefer more northern or central Chinese (Szechuan yum!) but Boston Lobster turned out to be really tasty. This is “comfortable” Chinese fare, there aren’t any pig intestines boiled in chili oil on the menu, but there is a lot of flavor and a very good value. With all this, and a giant tip, it came to $46 a person.
Service was awesome too, particularly by the standards of the SGV. They were super nice, very attentive, bringing water and napkins (gasp!), changing plates, and they even went out and found the duck. How cool is that?
