Nostalgia… to go /ShangPalace

Y (April '23, to go)

SCORE: Keep in mind if in the area /weirdusecase

ORDER: NA

VALUE: neutral - $90 for 3 vegetarian dishes

For context - I grew up having sunday dinner at this restaurant since I was 11. We used to live across the street, and it was an easy walk over after a sunday of going to weekend classes as a kid. My parents are strict vegetarians, and they first learned of a handful of dishes to order at chinese restaurants (regardless of subcuisine) when they first moved to the region in the late 80s. Thus, every single restaurant that falls into the "chinese restaurant" bucket, we order the same 4 dishes - Kung Pao tofu, broccoli with ginger / garlic, some variant of fried rice, yam ring. Thus take this as a review... with a very myopic lens, which if it applies to you, could be very handy

It happened that my folks flew in this sunday evening, and usually that means that by the time they clear immigrations and are home, it's hangry time. So I usually pick up something to go from their usual list of restaurants, and we have it for dinner at home. Yesterday I picked up from Shang Palace.

Food - the requests were fairly simple and straight forward. However in the past we had noticed quite a lot of inconsistency in an order that's so well known to the staff that I can just walk up and say "the usual". Burnt tofu, occasional accidental addition of chicken stock to the broccoli were not uncommon in our experience. However, this time none of that happened. Everything was as expected (ie tasty, but not heavy). Broccoli, inspite of traveling, was not overcooked, and was still a rich green and had some bite. They even added wild rice to the fried rice for added texture.

Packaging needed some work. as you can see from the photo below, the food was served in these cardboard boxes, that were then cling-wrapped to prevent seepage. While I definitely appreciate the added effort in attempting to reduce spillage, the result was that the clingfilm caused the boxes to become a soggy floppy mess. It was really difficult to even open the clingfilm without crushing the boxes within.

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