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| exterior of Yujean Kang's restaurant |
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| Steamed dumpling with green onion, egg, pork and vegetable |
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| A combination of three dishes: string beans, chicken with cashew nuts and scallops with cucumber |
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| Chicken with Glazed Cashew Nuts |
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| Sauteed Blue Lake Green Beans with Roasted Pork |
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| Mandarin Orange Cheesecake with Fresh Fruit in Raspberry and Passion Fruit Sauce |
For my birthday on May 21, I had dinner with my husband at one of my favorite restaurants in Los Angeles, Yujean Kang's a gourmet Chinese restaurant. They do not serve you typical Szechuan Chinese cuisine, but instead use high-quality ingredients to produce gourmet-level entrees at non-gourmet prices.
Although it is one of my favorite restaurants, I haven't actually eaten at Yujean Kang's for awhile. They have two dishes on their menu which I absolutely adore. They are: 1) crispy beef with chinese baby bok choi, szechuan style; and 2) chicken with glazed cashew nuts. In fact, I almost always order these two items whenever I go there.
We started with a very interesting steamed dumpling stuffed with four interesting ingredients (cooked egg, green onions, smoked pork and some vegetable whose name I forget. Unfortunately a single order of these only included 3 dumplings so I was forced to eat 2, after taking the close up picture seen above. They were quite small, but very yummy.
Since it had been awhile since I had eaten there we only ordered one of my favorites, the chicken with glazed cashew nuts (sliced chicken breast with assorted mushrooms, fresh snow peas and vanilla beans, served with sesame seed and glazed cashew nuts). This is a truly astonishing dish. The chicken is very, very tender, melting in your mouth, but incredibly flavorful thanks to the presence of vanilla beans and a yummy slightly sweet sauce. The dish has very interesting competing textures, with sweet, crunchy glazed walnuts and very smooth, slippery mushrooms and the aforementioned chicken. Additionally, there are bright green, crunchy snow peas which provide contrasting color and another interesting texture. The pictures above do not do it justice!
In addition to the Chicken with Glazed Walnuts, we ordered the Sauteed Green Beans with Pork, primarily to compare Yujeans Kang's version of this typical Szechuan dish with the same dish I've often ordered at Yang Chow restaurant. Honestly, I found Yujean Kang's version of the dish slightly inferior to Yang Chow's. The greens were not crunchy enough at Yujean's, although the dish was a nice contrast to the chicken. However, it was intended to be a light vegetable dish because the other two dishes contained protein and the addition of smoked pork made it seem a bit too substantial.
The third dish we ordered was one of the most expensive things on the menu, a $23 entree: the fresh spicy sea scallops with cucumber and jellyfish. The dish came with Szechuan peppercorn sauce on the side. My husband was very interested in ordering this because Szechuan peppercorns were banned for import into the United States for years (ban ended in 2005) and the spice is supposed to have an almost pharmacological effect on the tastebuds.
Hubby had dropped the knowledge that this was my birthday dinner so they insisted on providing a dessert for free. While I ran out to feed the meter (even on an early Saturday evening it is not wise to defy the Parking God in Pasadena) and when I returned there was a lovely (complementary) mandarin orange cheesecake with kiwi, grapefruit and tangerine artfully arranged around the plate. Amazingly, there was even mandarin inside the cheesecake itself, and this did not clash with the dairy-laden sweet.
All in all, Yujean Kang's is an excellent dining experience, one I would like to repeat soon, but next time I will make sure to order both of my favorite dishes!
Name: Yujean Kang's.
Location: 67 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91103.
Contact: 626-585-0855.
Visit: May 21, 2011.
AMBIANCE: A-.
SERVICE: A.
VALUE: B.
FOOD: A.
OVERALL: A- (3.667/4.0).
