Title: Sept 24, 2014
Author: jean komatsu
Last saved by: ENU

YELP ONLY >> Silken tofu is not supposed to be served like this, its for making desserts not a main meal.>> ^P Actually, that's not true at all, says this JapAm married to a Hong-Kong-born Chinese-Portuguese immigrant. Soft tofu is often used for savory dishes, and traditionally WAS the tofu used for Ma Po Dow Fu, for example. Full Moon properly uses this tofu in its claypots, which we were happy to see. Most restaurants switched to the commercial "silken" as it's tender but not as fall-apart as the fresher "custard" tofu, because it stays fresh much longer. True custard tofu spoils within 48 hrs or less, making it too expensive to keep in a restaurant.

Full Moon Seafood House
2041 MacArthur Blvd. @Dimond, Oakland, CA
http://fullmoonseafoodhouse.com/ (There's menus on the web, but none of them completely matched what we were given) 
Review date: Sept 2014

We ate here a couple of times in the years before I started writing up reviews. We found it gave large portions, and okay Chinese food – not great, but not bad either. I'm not sure if it's still run by the original owners or not, as over a year ago It closed up for several months before reopening again. Our long-time stand-by, Ly Luck, has gone from merely bad to worse, verging on inedible, so we would like to find another source for noodles and the occasional Cantonese dinner.

This is a large restaurant, a stand-alone building with three separate dining rooms. There's always been something cheerless about the interior, which is no better or worse than any other of its ilk around Oakland. Despite the long closure it didn't look as if anything had changed, right down to the patterned fabric on the chairs and the desultory decorations around the room. There is a TV, which is mercifully turned off. 

Most of the locals get take-out. The owners are reasonably efficient but not very cheerful, although pleasant enough. The menu is very long but although they do a reasonable number of spicy dishes, most of the dishes are Cantonese. This is a "value" restaurant so portions are substantial.

One vast improvement has been a strict no-MSG policy. To compensate they use a fair amount of soya, which is fine with us. Carlos has a very high tolerance for salt in his Chinese food; I'm slightly less fond of it.

We started with the potstickers, which turned out to be a terrible choice. These are cheap frozen/commercial kuo tieh, and the thick dough is an abysmal quality. The filling is nominally ground pork with onions and a lot of salt. Oddly, what pleased us was the condiment plate they brought. We have not seen a restaurant bring us the classic trifecta of bottles of soya/Chinese vinegar (unsweetened)/red chile sauce, in a very long time. 

However, things improved considerably with the other dishes. Full Moon has some of the Cantonese standards we have long missed, one of them being the steamed minced pork with Chinese sausage (lop cheong) and chopped water chestnuts. We infinitely prefer the steamed minced pork with salted egg, but that dish has virtually vanished off restaurant menus. It does show up on some of the on-line menus for Full Moon, so the salt egg version may be available by special order. This sausage version was a hit with me, as I love lop cheong and the delicate softness of the steamed pork is wonderful with a bowl of rice. Carlos thought it needed salt; I disagreed but I wasn't eating as much rice as he was.

Carlos loves the lo han vegetables, that Buddhist mix of napa cabbage, tofu, beancurd skin, mushrooms, thin glass noodles and sometimes fresh loofah. This one left off the loofah for sliced zucchini, which was an acceptable substitute. Loofah is pretty much a "texture" ingredient and doesn't have a whole lot of flavor on its own anyway. There were a few peapods tossed in, but overall this dish never has a lot of green vegetables in it. He thought it was okay, and enjoyed it as it's been a long time since we had it. I'm never a big fan of this dish, although I enjoyed the generous amount of glass noodles that soaked up all the brown gravy.

Full Moon offers a variety of claypots, but there is only one we are ever interested in: chicken with salted fish (ham yuu) and soft tofu. Although light on the chicken and leaving the ham yuu in rather large pieces, the tofu was very fresh and overall the dish was very good. Had they chopped the ham yuu finer so it melted into the sauce, this would have reached excellent. Ham yuu is never cheap, and many restaurants skimp on it. This was a goodly amount, perhaps just a hair under what we'd like to see. 

The rice is medium grain and soft, which we approved of. We also ordered some food to go. The menu advertised they do Hong Kong-style chow mein by request. Carlos chose his usual beef; I chose my usual BBQ pork. We also got an order of gai lan, Chinese broccoli, as I never care for the cheap bok choy used in noodle dishes.

Sadly, the next day we found both chow meins mediocre: greasy with gloppy sauce, poor browning of the cheap quality noodles. The BBQ pork was also weirdly sweet, with no umami at all. It tasted as if it was glazed with only honey and nothing else. Whatever deli Full Moon bought this from, they might as well have spritzed whipped cream on top and called it dessert BBQ.

Overall, although not perfect Full Moon was good enough that we'd come back again. We liked the claypot and the steamed pork hash, and the gai lan was nicely handled. Gai lan is a winter vegetable; in summer the skin gets thick and tough from the heat. To cook it properly in summer, the stem ends should be halved lengthwise, which many fail to do but Full Moon's chef did. 

There's a couple of dishes we would love to try – among them, a steamed chicken with mushrooms and Chinese sausage that I'd begun to think was an extinct dish in today's restaurants. When made with lop cheong, it's a homestyle dish. This is a less expensive version of the classic banquet dish, which is a shallow casserole of alternating slices of properly velveted snowy white chicken breast with paper-thin slices of Yunnan ham (similar to the classic Smithfield ham). It is steamed for about twenty minutes and is both colorful and amazingly flavorful, a light and elegant dish that is one of the best "special occasion" plates at a good banquet.

We had enough food for two dinners and a full lunch, which was a good value for the price. Although I've been giving Ly Luck/Oakland a 1.5-2 star rating, in comparison with the dive-y takeout Lucky 37 and the no-MSG Full Moon, Ly Luck drops to -1 star. Full Moon gets the 2-star rating; it does a number of dishes decently enough that you don't fear for your digestion. 

Overall, it's another one of those that's doing just enough to get by, without rocking any boats.

Full Moon misses big on the Hong Kong chow mein, however. We'll have to keep looking.

Two people, enough for two dinners/one lunch: one starter, two noodle dishes, two vegetable dishes, two mains, with tip was $60.