CLOSED DECEMBER 2012

Ching Hua
1650 Park St., Alameda, CA
http://www.chinghuaonpark.com/menuItems/menu.htm
Review date: February 2012

In trying various Chinese restaurants around the East Bay, we've been increasingly disappointed in the low level of quality and execution most of them offer. What's worse is that it's appears most reviewers are both extremely price-restrictive (they can pay more, but they won't, for Chinese food) and without a lot of experience in eating better quality Asian food.

Ching Hua is a branch of Shen Hua in Berkeley. Both restaurants get mixed reviews on Yelp, partly because they try to hit a slightly higher price point with better quality, as well as the fact that until recently they were well-known for being short-staffed. Apparently this has been turned around by someone who realized that attractive décor and Chinese food aimed at a bistro level (with prices set at a slightly higher level than average) were being sabotaged by angry Yelp reviews of being ignored or underserved by overworked waitstaff. 

Fixing that was the easy part. Changing people's minds about what to expect from Chinese restaurant food remains the harder task. There are numerous snippy comments (even by Chinese Millennials) about the absence of....

….fortune cookies.

Seriously.  People are whining that at the end of the meal, they didn't get a stale mediocre cheap American-invented sugar wafer with a mass-market proverb stuffed inside.

Being the one who is the most frustrated by the increasingly mediocrity we've experienced in our favorite cuisine, I managed to convince Carlos into approaching Ching Hua as an exercise in experimenting with new flavors, rather than expecting the traditional flavors we've use as our 'gold standards'. 

This state of mind is something we foodies look forward to at today's bistros. But when it comes to ethnic, often one gets 'stuck' on repeating the same taste profile for a dish. 

Artisan Bistro/Lafayette is expected to prepare chicken breast or fish a different way every time we come. We try it and applaud the creativity, expecting our taste buds and palate to be challenged and invigorated.

For example, much as we enjoy a chicken pot pie – and we looooovve chicken pot pies – we're perfectly willing to try various experimental versions. If we weren't, we would never have tried, and learned to love, bastilla in its own various iterations. And empanadas. And...well, you get the general idea.

But let someone mess with the Chinese standard 'chow fun with shrimp and eggs, gravy-style', and we're instantly offended. What—they've added green peas? And slices of carrot? Heresy! 

Yet that's not only contradictory and biased, it's limiting a wonderful cuisine to a tiny menu, thereby stifling creativity and eventually, execution....contributing to the commercial decline we're experiencing.

An original can be wonderful, but variations make life interesting. And that's what we've been missing in Chinese restaurants. That little bit of inspiration, a touch more care with ingredients and a more polished execution. We don't want to abandon all our old stand-bys, but we'd like to find some new exciting favorites in a cuisine that's been around the West long enough to take advantage of the growing interest in good food.

And so we came to lunch at Ching Hua. Their food tends towards the spicy, which meant just in case, Inez wasn't with us. Of course, we have higher standards of chile heat than many people, so when we placed our order, I requested that the spicy dishes be made really, really hot – "seriously hot", were my words.

They have a good lunch menu, but also gave us the a la carte dinner menu, so we picked and chose between them. The waiter did hesitate when he took our order, warning us that we'd ordered a lot of food. We assured him that we would take the leftovers home (and then made the request for the extra heat).

He brought cups of house soup, but neither of us cared for it. A variant of hot-and-sour soup, it was an unthickened consomme, heavy on the vinegar and light on the heat. It wasn't a promising start.

But things immediately headed upwards with the arrival of the chicken-shrimp crispy wontons, which come with a dry mustard sauce and a sweet-sour sauce. Ching Hua bases their housemade sweet-sour sauce on cherries, and it's a nice change. 

I don't normally like mustard sauce but a little dab of it livened up the sweet-sour. The wontons were stuffed full of diced chicken breast and tiny bay shrimp, nicely fried and greaseless. 

Ching Hua advertises its noodles are housemade, always a good sign. They had tan-tan mein on the menu, but when Carlos discovered it was a vegetarian version, he decided to skip it. Instead he ordered the spicy curry seafood noodles. We also ordered dry-sauteed green beans, spicy dry-fried chicken, and an order of the Garlic Buo Tsai Noodles. 

The green beans were the standard American Kentucky Wonder-type, but they were young, fresh, and properly cooked while still with a slight crunch. Unlike the craze for 'al dente' stir-frying that has afflicted some places, Ching Hua gives green beans the proper amount of cooking to bring out their sweetness and remove the grassy taste. 

Ching Hua doesn't use ground pork in any dishes, so it doesn't appear in this one either. What does appear are the chopped pickled vegetables, which along with finely diced green onion and a slight touch of garlic and chile flakes, making this a fine rendition of one of my favorites.  As I told Carlos later, one can leave out the pork but not the pickled vegetables, which are what makes this dish so distinctive.

The dry-fried chicken is lightly battered, deep-fried, and comes with a spicy orange sauce. Why they don't just call it Orange Chicken I'm not sure, but it's a wonderful version. Carlos admitted I was justified in asking the kitchen to make it extra hot for us, because the two spicy dishes came out just right. This had juicy chicken breast, a light batter (nice change from the armor plated batter-frying that bad restaurants produce), and a savory spicy sauce that was perfect.

My garlic noodles were a massive bowlful. And the mein was a bright green from spinach, a real surprise. They were absolutely fresh, cooked then quickly stir-fried with thin slices of fresh shiitake mushroom and an enormous quantity of chopped garlic. Nothing else – they were perfect as is. Amazing by itself, perfect with food.

Carlos received a pasta bowl full of thicker udon-style noodles, with scallops and shrimps. The sauce was a rich reddish-brown from the generous use of Asian chili sauce as well as a big fistful of dried whole red Jalapenos. The chiles showed blistered sides from being properly stir-fried in the oil before anything else went in, a step often ignored by careless cooks. 

He picked out the green onion shreds, but gave me the baby corn which were fabulous with my garlic noodles – so much so I almost forgot to eat the spicy chicken. We both were impressed by the spicy curry sauce, which was amazingly flavorful.

So much so, that Carlos was certain they must have used MSG. When I told him they advertise as a 'no MSG' menu, he laughed and said, "Oh, so it's real flavor, then!"

We had over-ordered, and brought back some of everything to eat at home. This worked out well because our gas service had inadvertently been cut off by PG&E when they came to fix an outside leak but didn't turn the service back on again before they left. So instead of the chicken kebab dinner I had planned to broil, we heated up the leftovers in the microwave instead. 

If anything, the spicy curry noodles were even better reheated – the flavors really came together on the go-around. The aroma of his noodles was mouth-watering, much more evident than when we received the dish in the restaurant.

We were pleased with our lunch and want to return. It's what we were hoping to find, a definitive step up in the quality of the ingredients and the execution by a good kitchen. The waitstaff (which is all Hispanic) was efficient and pleasant, the location (with parking; it's part of the Alameda Marketplace building) is convenient, and we're looking forward to exploring the menu further.

Carlos gave them the ultimate compliment: "I think I'm willing to try their vegetarian version of tan-tan mein!"

Two people: One starter, three dishes, one side of noodles, with tip was $57.