Restaurant: Shaanxi Gourmet
Location: 8518 E Valley Blvd, Rosemead, CA 91770. (626) 288-9886
Date: June 26, 2015
Cuisine: North Western Chinese
Rating: Noodles galore!
I’ve been wanting to hit up this place for a long time, as I’ve heard good things and I was a fan of this style of food when I was in Xian years ago.
Shaanxi is located in the same mini-mall as Alibaba Foot Spa and a good Taiwanese tea/shave ice place.
The menu.
Cold appetizers from the cabinet: spicy beef and bean curd. The beef was “preserved” with that pastrami like thing. Nice.
Crispy pickled shredded potatoes and cucumbers.
Cold steamed noodle with sesame sauce. The sauce mostly hid at the bottom, but these knife cut noodles had a great texture.
Eggs with tomato. Home style!
Beef with noodle soup. The noodles were thick chunks of knife cut and there was some “bread” bits soaked in here too.
Lamb skewers. Decent. Hot, with cumin and a bit of heat.
Shaanxi sandwich with pork. A Chinese take on a Carolina BBQ pork sandwich? Not quiet. The bread was lighter than usual for this kind of dish. It was pretty decent.
Noodles. I’m not sure which kind, but these hand cut babies were long and had an interesting cumin sauce on them. Quiet nice.
XinJiang style chicken stew with potato in a big plate. This was the most popular dish at the restaurant. The plate is HUGE. The chicken was tasty, if a little bone ridden. I liked the potatoes in the cumin based sauce too. And under all that is a big pile of cumin soaked noodles which I love — even if they were hard to pick up.
Fried potato, green pepper, and eggplant. Fine, but not my favorite version of this kind of eggplant dish.
Hot and spicy rice noodles.
Look at these puppies. Imagine trying to get them on your plate!
Fish filet in hot chili oil with mixed vegetables. This was a big pot of the classic Szechuan fish filet dish. Very tasty with a nice Szechuan peppercorn numb. So much chili oil!
Stir fried cumin spiced lamb. A classic of these regions. Fine.
Overall, Shaanxi was an interesting experience. They didn’t have a liquor license and so didn’t allow us to open our wine. Bummer, but fair enough. Service was nice, but they did completely ignore our request to bring things out slowly and dumped the first half of the meal on our table in 3 minutes. Then we had to threaten their tip to get them to slow down. Once they did there was a 1 hour pause before food resumed. Probably our fault as we should have just ordered the dishes 2 at a time. It doesn’t take them look anyway.
Food was very tasty though and quiet different than some other regions. All those knife cut noodles! Things are so noodle centric they didn’t even HAVE white rice!
For more LA Chinese dining reviews click here.
or more crazy Hedonist dinners here!
Now working through the 626 Trifecta, next door for snow.
These plates are a foot across. This $6 mango snow had vanilla ice cream, egg pudding, honey boba, and almond jelly.
The green tea snow had vanilla ice cream, leeche jelly, red been, and taro.
The third and final “event” in the trifecta is the cheap ($15 an hour) foot massage. I ended up with the manager, and he was so strong I was writhing beneath his not-so-tender ministrations. Good though.
