Restaurant Chu in Oakland, CA - update, lunch
Review date: Dec. 2014
(previous reviews appended below)

We came for lunch and were pleased to receive our usual good service from Manuel, an excellent waiter with above-average customer skills. He remembers that we don't like a lot of soya in our food, which is praise-worthy as we don't come here all that often. 

When it's just the two of us we can't order a lot, so we stuck with our usuals: the oxtail dumplings, silken tofu with ground beef sauce, Ghan Shao stir-fry lamb, and an assorted veggie stir-fry that was decent. We like the Ghan Shao, which uses the classic baking soda tenderizing, but on lamb rather than the traditional beef. 

We'll always regret that Chu's sibling Ching Hua/Alameda couldn't make a go of it. If I knew where those cooks went, we'd follow them. Those Latinos did a better job cooking Chinese food than today's Chinese cooks do, with great quality ingredients and good technique. At Chu, the kitchen is good but not quite up to Ching Hua's level, although they're very accommodating to any kind of special requests.

We don't love Chu, but we like it a lot. Some of their dishes are too sugar-heavy to be pleasing to us, but we appreciate the focus on quality rather than price. We just wish other so-called foodies did, too. Sigh. 

Maybe one of these days we'll see great Chinese food again in the Bay Area. But for now, Chu's somewhat timid efforts are the best we've got in Oakland.

Two people, lunch: one starter, three dishes, with tip was $71.

Restaurant Chu in Oakland, CA – update, lunch
Review date: July 2014
(previous reviews appended below)

Carlos and I brought his mom Inez to Chu for lunch again. It's been a while since we were last here with her. Today her dementia was a little more noticeable. It's still at the moderate stage, but some days she's more "together" than others. She didn't remember being here before, and it was clear to me that when we said we were ordering the oxtail dumplings which Inez loved on our last visit, she didn't comprehend the word "oxtail" although it's always been one of her favorite foods.

Chu brings a free bowl of soup at lunch. For the first time, it wasn't hot and sour soup. This was a clear broth, with cubes of tofu, shreds of curly lettuce, and slices of fresh shiitake. Carlos and Inez liked it a lot; I was "meh" about it.

The oxtail dumplings are a special but they seem always available. They are wildly overstuffed, a nice change from the many dumplings that appear scientifically calibrated to contain as little filling as possible in relation to the amount of dough wrapper. The oxtail meat was a little overseasoned with five-spice this time, but Carlos didn't object. We did find them a touch oversalted, however. 

The pork and shrimp steamed dumplings are very firm and porky, more like steamed wontons than dim sum shu mai. Chu's dough wrappers aren't the thinnest, but they're reasonably thin and tender. Like the oxtail, however, they were a bit too salty.

We ordered a bowl of the dan dan mein, which we've liked before (not loved, but Chu's version is the best of a bad bunch in the EBay). But this tasted as if a different cook had made it. It was somehow out of balance: too much bean sauce, not enough chilies, and the strange addition of a handful of edamame, green soybeans, seemed just as odd as it sounds. There was a good amount of hand-chopped pork in it, but that wasn't enough to pull this out of the nondescript. Its only positive was that it wasn't greasy, but the flavors seemed dull. 

Oddly, this was much better the next day as leftovers, when the sauce was absorbed into the noodles and the flavors had time to blend. It still wasn't a great bowl of dan dan mein, but as a pork noodle dish it was pretty good.

The next three dishes accompanied rice. One was the bitter melon in black bean sauce. Carlos and Inez are very fond of fu qua. I loathe it, so this was all for them. It comes in 2" lengths, cored and stuffed with a tofu/spinach filling in a gluey brown gravy with the douchi, fermented black soybeans. They said it was good, not great. But it's been a long time since they had it so they were both happy we ordered it.

The custard tofu with beef sauce is a dish we've had a couple of times before. This time, it tasted good (it's a salty sauce) but like the other dishes, somewhat flat. We can't quite figure out why the food was tasting different, but it wasn't as satisfying as before.

The best dish was the vegetable. We tried to order the dry-fried asparagus, but they didn't have any. They offered pea sprouts with garlic, but when the dish came, it looked and tasted like very mature spinach with big cloves of stir-fried garlic. It was quite tasty and we all liked it. But if these were pea sprouts, I'd like to sell you a bridge to go along with your recent purchase of the Washington Monument.

We brought a lot of food home with us. But this lunch was disappointing compared to our previous meals here. It wasn't a huge difference but still, the cooking was at least a half-level below where it had been. Whether this is temporary, or there's been a change of cooks to negatively affect the food overall, we don't know. We'll probably have to return at least once more to figure out what's happening.

Three people, lunch (with enough leftovers for dinner for two): three starters, one noodle bowl, three entrées, one order of rice, one large pot of tea, with tip was $105.

Restaurant Chu in Oakland, CA – update, dinner
http://www.restaurantchu.com/Dinner.html
Review date: April 2014
(previous reviews appended below)

We have been to Chu several times for lunch. Although we don't love Chu the way we loved sibling Ching Hua/Alameda, it's several leagues above its competition in the Alameda/Oakland area. This is not saying much, considering how disgracefully low Chinese restaurant food has fallen over the last two decades, but Chu would still show well even against some of the SF Chinese restaurants. 

In fact, competition would probably spur them to the greater heights Ching Hua often reached. Chu comes so close the misses are all the more frustrating. They have the better quality ingredients and good skills – it's their conception which falters in our eyes. They seem afraid to wean their mostly-Caucasian clientele away from the heavy doses of sugar, and some of their dishes end up being too similar to one another.

Carlos and I decided to try dinner this time. There are items on the dinner menu which don't appear at lunch. Although Chu is a member of OpenTable, their Happy Hour menu is so popular, they don't take reservations for dinner until 7 p.m. We took the chance that coming early would net us a table, which it did. 

We chose one soup, four starters, one entrée, one vegetable dish, the latter two along with white rice. They were as follows:

Hot and sour soup, small bowl (not individual). Carlos claimed he could finish this all on his own. He couldn't, but fortunately I like Chu's version so I had the last individual bowlful. Chu puts edamame (green soybeans) in the soup, which Carlos doesn't like but I do. I happily fished them all out and ate them.

Cherry pork cubes. Chu's rendition pales against sibling Ching Hua's, but Ching Hua is gone so we are left only with this. It's not bad – the pork is in good-sized 1-1/2" chunks and not overcooked, only lightly battered. There's four cubes, so it's a nice starter size plate. But the pale red cherry sauce that was a delicate masterpiece of sour cherries with only a touch of sugar at Ching Hua, has devolved into a too-thick glop at Chu. It glazes the cubes with enough sugar so any suggestion of fruity cherry flavor was lost. Still, the sauce wasn't a total loss – it was great with the wontons, below.

Stuffed pork and ginger deep-fried wontons. Classic, simple, crunchy little nuggets of pork and ginger goodness. Chu serves them Northern style with vinegar. They were much better with the fluorescent red sweet-sour cherry sauce that was overwhelming on the pork.

I remarked to Carlos it is the height of irony how in our (rapidly advancing) old age, this simple, basic Cantonese item has disappeared off everybody's menus. Around the late 1980's the meat stuffing disappeared out of the wontons (even in San Francisco) so when we ordered them, we would get deep-fried dough, and only dough. You can get eggrolls – usually greasy and stuffed with who-knows-what – a thousand different ways from a staggering variety of Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants, delis, bakeries, and grocery store freezers ad nauseum, but stuffed wontons? Nope and nope. I can still buy frozen wontons for soup, so I fry them up at home every once in a while. But at a time when deep-frying seems to be The Cooking Method of Choice for 80% of chefs, we wonder why did these little nuggets disappear, out of dozens of (better) possibilities for culinary extinction?

Fried calamari. Dusted with rice flour, fried a little too long, these came with a thin tangy soy-and-chili dip. They were okay, but weren't anything remarkable. We wouldn't bother ordering them again.

Tea smoked duck legs with buns. Carlos and I split on this dish. The duck was reheated by frying. It had little smoked flavor, plus it hadn't been boned. They just chopped right through the leg bone and put the slices on the plate. The meat was dry, chewy, and without a knife, impossible to neatly tear the duck meat off the drumstick slices. The buns were indifferent flour, the hoisin super-sweet, the green onion shreds a bit dry from being prepped hours previous.

I'm not much a hoisin fan. There are so many other more interesting Chinese sauces, so a little hoisin goes a long way for me. I hate dry sandwiches and overcooking duck is a sin in my eyes. 

Carlos, OTOH, loves dry sandwiches (except for burgers, go figure!) and was perfectly happy making hoisin and green onion sandwiches, while tearing the duck off the bone separately.

Ma Po Tofu. This is almost identical to the hot and sour soup, just lacking the vegetables and the vinegar. It also was very low-salt, which may be because the waiter recognized us from several lunches, and remembered we had asked about lowering the salt level on our dishes. Oddly, Chu puts edamame in the Ma Po stew as well. Neither of us thought this was a great idea, although we liked the mildly-spicy level of the gravy. This came by default as we had forgotten to specify extra spicy. I added a little soya halfway through the meal, which improved the Ma Po gravy. Chu uses a really fine soya; it has excellent flavor. Although the Ma Po was good, we found it a little disappointing and wouldn't be inclined to order it again unless we were really craving some. The Custard Tofu with Ground Beef, a regular special, is more appealing to us.

Sugar Pea with White Crab Mushrooms. The clear winner was this dish. This is one of the best vegetable dishes we've had in a Chinese restaurant in a very long time. The sugar snap peas are properly cooked, which means the pods are soft, not crisp, making them even sweeter as well as tender. The white crab mushrooms, which we have never heard of before, looked and tasted like grown-up enoki mushrooms. They were fabulous, soaking up a thickened white wine-garlic sauce to make us capable of killing vampires at twenty paces. Yum!

We brought home enough tofu and sugar peas for a lunch for one person. Carlos had hot tea, although oddly no one asked this time what kind of tea he wanted. I chose iced tea, which was a blah understrength green tea. 

Service, as always, was excellent.

No, we don't love Chu. But as we continue to explore the menu, the dishes they do well, they do very well. If they would have the courage to exercise a little more vision, maybe a growing sophistication in Oakland's collective palate would support it this time.

We're not fond of tip-toeing through a menu, but if that's what it takes to get some decent Chinese food in this town…well, it's a small price to pay for a 10-minute drive.

It may well be, as we've seen with Ohgane's/Oakland first-gen founders and their next-gen Bowl'd mini-empire, that it will take one more upcoming generation to rediscover what Asian food used to taste like before diners bludgeoned it to Death By Domino.

Two people, dinner: one soup, four starters, one entrée, one vegetable, two teas, white rice, with tip was $94.

Restaurant Chu in Oakland, CA – update, lunch
http://www.restaurantchu.com/Lunch.html  
Review date: March 2014
(previous reviews appended below)

We decided to take my MIL Inez to lunch at Chu, as a change from the usual Japanese lunch at Ta-Ke Sushi. Lunch is seldom busy at Chu, as it's seen as a little too expensive by locals, who tend to populate Chu's Happy Hour instead.

The oxtail dumplings and custard tofu with ground beef were still on the Specials menu, so we ordered them. We also added the Spicy Chicken Wings, which really aren't that spicy. For Inez we chose the Sweet and Sour Pork, which uses a light tamarind sauce. Finally, we added a bowl of the Zha Jiang Noodles, which we hadn't tried before. 

The oxtail dumplings were a big hit with Inez, who loves oxtail as much as we do. The custard tofu pleased her as well, although its sauce tends to be a little too salty with the ground beef and a thick soy-based gravy. The spicy chicken wings were fried a bit too hard for her, though, as she has fragile teeth, although she liked the flavor of the sweet and (mildly) spicy sauce.

The sweet and sour pork had cubes that were also fried a bit hard. The sauce was good, although scant. We thought it had little sourness to balance the sugar, but she enjoys sweet food so she didn't mind. All of us avoided the colorful but half-raw and superfluous small chunks of red and green bell peppers.

The Zha Jiang noodles is one of those dishes that shows the way food can travel across long distances and cultures. Zha Jiang is a classic Chinese noodle dish which eventually became a Korean national dish called Jajangmyeon. Here at Chu it has made the perfect circle: although this is the Chinese name, it is made Korean style, with the black chunjang (a salty, black-colored paste made from roasted soybeans), rather than soy sauce and yellow bean paste as the Chinese original uses.

Sadly, neither of us cared for the Zha Jiang; we found it bland and uninteresting compared to the Dan Dan Mein that Chu makes. Zha Jiang always catches me by surprise – it looks salty, being a thick sauce based on Chinese dow see, the fermented black beans which normally are quite salty (they're packed in salt, which is how they ferment, like sauerkraut). But both times I've had it – once at a Korean/Chinese place, now at Chu – it's the blandest, most tasteless noodle dish ever. It perked up considerably when we added the too-salty ground beef sauce from the custard tofu dish.

The noodle bowls are very large, so we had leftovers to bring home. Inez was very pleased to have Chinese food again, so she made a good meal.

Although we enjoy Restaurant Chu, it is nowhere near the level of quality and creativity shown by its now-closed sibling Ching Hua/Alameda. The frying is just a little overdone; the sauces tend to have too much sugar or salt, without much regards to balance. It's almost like Chinese food reinterpreted as pub food. That makes it tasty, but not as good as it could be, if the owners and cooks cared more. 

It is still above average for a Chinese restaurant however (which regrettably doesn't take much doing), so we rate it a fairly solid "B" on specific dishes like the dumplings, the dan dan mein, and the custard tofu (just because we love the stuff, and find it so rarely).

Three people, lunch: two starters, three entrées, one beverage, with tip was $92.

Restaurant Chu in Oakland, CA – update, lunch
Review date: February 2014
(previous review appended below)

I tried to interest Carlos in an Ethiopian lunch, but he preferred to return to Restaurant Chu for a second visit in the same week. This gave us the opportunity to try more of their starters, and a different lunch plate entrée.

Not surprisingly, the waiter Manuel recognized us, greeting us cheerfully. We were the first of a number of diners, with a party of six holding a last-minute birthday party on the other side, so it was fortunate that they managed to find some last-minute floor help to assist him.

We weren't in any hurry, however, so we perused the menu and selected the following:

•	Oxtail dumplings. Although listed under specials, they have oxtail on their regular dinner menu so it's very possible this is a "regular" on the Specials menu. Eight small dumplings to an order.

•	Pork-crab dumplings. Made mo-mo style like the oxtail dumplings, the thin skin is very pleasing. Carlos really likes these. Four to an order.

•	Shrimp-scallion dumplings. These were made with traditional wonton skins, pleated at the top and steamed. The filling is good, but the dough is too heavy compared to the mo-mo style dumplings. Five to an order.

•	Mushroom-spinach dumplings. Also made mo-mo style. Carlos found them bland, but I found them tasty. A nice relief from the salt and sugar of our main dishes. Four to an order.

•	Potstickers. These are the classic potstickers, filled with seasoned pork and no filler such as cabbage or onions. The bottoms are well-browned and crunchy, which I liked but Carlos didn't – he prefers his potstickers very lightly browned instead. Four to an order.

On every table there are three corked mini-decanters: soya, white rice vinegar, and chili oil. With the dumpling assortment, they bring two other dips. One is a premixed soya and vinegar, and the other is a mix of chile, vinegar, and fermented shrimp sauce. 

We again ordered the special of spicy dry-fried chicken wings. This time they were slightly overcooked, although the glaze was still tasty and thinly applied. Still good, but the kitchen gets a demerit for taking their eyes off it for too long.

This time we selected the Kirin short rib lunch plate, described as boneless beef, "pepper spice", soy, green onion and garlic. The plates come with rice (we prefer the jasmine to brown), a small bowl of green salad with mayo dressing and the usual two orange wedges.

Manuel had requested they reduce the salt for us, but that just made the Kirin beef taste too sweet. The same baking soda treatment was applied here, but the beef should have been cut thinner or the soda left on longer. The meat was on the chewy side, although tasty. It also lacked sufficient wok hay, aka caramelization.

There is a little too much similarity in Chu's sauces, which is disappointing as sibling Ching Hua/Alameda showed much more distinction in their dishes. This beef stir-fry was almost identical to the Ghao Shan Lamb we had two days prior, except for the lack of chile spicing and use of a different meat. The beef was good with rice, but Carlos and I agreed you wouldn't want to order both of these dishes for the same dinner. Pick one or the other, but not both.

We weren't as pleased with lunch this time. Much depends on what you order, and knowing which dishes are too similar to order together at the same time. Still, we really like the higher quality of the ingredients. Restaurant Chu is much more timid about introducing Northern-style cuisine to the East Bay than is China Village/Albany, especially after the Chus' Ching Hua had to close when people refused to pay for really good upscale Chinese food. But perhaps in time they will consider pushing the envelope a little more, as Millennial Asian restaurateurs start to make inroads with fusion menus and quality ingredients, such as KoJa Kitchen and the now-gone Copan.

Although we were disappointed to learn that the chow mein on the menu is the typical Northern stir-fried style, we still have some interesting dishes to explore on the dinner menu. There are several soups Carlos is interested in, and a wider choice of entrées. We'll look forward to returning one of these evenings, to try the dinner cooks.

Two people, lunch: five starters, one main, one lunch plate, two beverages, with tip was $75.

Restaurant Chu in Oakland, CA – update, lunch
Review date: February 2014

We were so enthused by our initial lunch at Chu in late January 2014, we decided to return and explore the menu further. 

Once again the free soup was the hot and sour, which was nicely warming on a cold day.

The list of specials were mostly the same, but there was a pork-stuffed eggplant in jalapeno black bean sauce which sounded interesting. Carlos knows I love eggplant (he isn't quite so fond of it) so we ordered that. It was tempting to order the special of oxtail dumplings again, but we restrained ourselves and chose three starters from the regular menu.

The first was the oddly named "Trio of ginger lemon fish ceviche". This was a freshwater fish, tasting like either tilapia or something similar, in a marinade of ginger, Meyer lemon, carrot and parsley. The "trio" designation is because it is served in three Chinese soup spoons, about two bites each. I don't normally enjoy ceviche as much as Carlos does, but I loved this. 

Carlos thought the ceviche was good, but the dish he preferred was the pork-crab dumplings. These are shaped like mo-mo's, and there's no filler used. It's just crab and pork, mild and sweet. Unlike the oxtail dumplings which come nine to an order, the pork-crab dumplings come in quantities of four. As Restaurant Chu has two other additional types of dumplings in addition to potstickers, this gives even a table of two diners like us, the opportunity to try all four types without being inundated with too many dumplings.

(Although admittedly, it's hard to argue that there is such a thing as too many dumplings when they're good ones, LOL)

The third starter we ordered was the ubiquitous "Pan Pacific Crab Wontons", the crabmeat in cream cheese filling that is wrapped in classic wonton style and deep-fried. Many people rave about these; we weren't so impressed. Thirty years ago my mother introduced us to a much better homemade version using a variety of shellfish, less cream cheese, and made them into eggrolls – giving the nice crunch but a whole lot more of a tastier filling. 

Back in the days when I threw sit-down, elaborate dinner parties on a monthly basis, I used to make these eggrolls as starters, or as a filling for delicate seafood ravioli in cream sauce. A restaurant version just isn't going to be able to compare with what you or I can easily make at home. At home one doesn't have to worry about the bottom line! So these wontons suffered in comparison, being mostly fried dough with a little bit of filling. We wouldn't order them again.

One dish we really loved at the now-vanished sibling Ching Hua/Alameda was their garlic noodles. Restaurant Chu has them on the menu, but we were disappointed to receive a bowl of handmade noodles turned brown with soya. The garlic flavor was lovely, but the taste of the noodles was too salty to eat with food. It was fine by itself, but Chu's food tends to be a bit on salty side – more old-style Chinese, where one is expected to eat three bowls of rice while sharing just a couple of dishes. Chu uses really high quality soya; but a little goes a long way when you've been on a low-salt diet for decades as we have.

The pork-stuffed eggplant was a winner for eggplant lovers like me. 2" tall rounds of Japanese eggplant were hollowed down halfway and stuffed with a ground pork mixture. The jalapeno black bean sauce was tasty, but again Carlos and I agreed that this dish, like the others, is meant for lots of bland starch. The eggplant wasn't salted, but the pork filling was, so in combination with the sauce it needs a big bowl of rice.

The Ghan Shao Lamb is available at both dinner and lunch. The latter is one of the lunch plates, served with a bowl of rice (jasmine or brown), a small indifferent green salad (fortunately in a bowl so it can be set aside), and a couple of fresh cold navel orange wedges for dessert.

The lamb is sliced boneless lamb shoulder, neatly trimmed, and seasoned with soy, garlic, ginger, and something called "pepper spice infused". It's also tenderized the classic Chinese restaurant way, by soaking it briefly in water and baking soda. 

Although normally reserved for tougher beef cuts, this technique can be used on any chewy meat. It fell somewhat out of fashion at most places – SE Asians don't use this technique, and they own most of the lower-end Chinese restaurants these days; upscale places never needed to use it. It leaves a distinctive texture and taste. You might not immediately identify it, but any Boomer who hung around hole-in-the-wall noodle joints in Chinatown knows it when they taste it. 

On the Ghan Shao Lamb the use of ginger and "pepper spices", along with that very good soya and a small dose of sugar, obscures the baking soda treatment. I doubt most people even notice it; Carlos didn't until I pointed it out to him. We really liked this lamb, and would definitely order it again. Again, however, it's meant to go with plenty of starch, so you're forewarned.

The waiter, Manuel, asked us how we liked the food. We replied it was good, but a little higher in salt than we prefer. He said the kitchen would be happy to adjust the salt as we wish, except for the marinated ingredients that are prepped ahead of time. We were pleased to hear that, and hope that we will be able to specify no soya at all on our garlic noodles the next time we order them.

Overall, we were very pleased with our second lunch. We'll plan to return and explore more of the menu. Carlos wants to try all the types of dumplings, along with the potstickers and another plate of those chicken wings we had on our first visit.

Carlos ordered the black tea, which was fragrant and excellent. I also ordered an iced tea.

Two people, lunch: three starters, one main, one lunch plate, two beverages, with tip came to $79.

Restaurant Chu
5362 College Ave. @Manila, Oakland, CA
http://www.restaurantchu.com/Menu.html
Review date: January 2014

Carlos and I are sadly out of fashion these days (and probably always have been, LOL).  We favor Cantonese and Shanghainese over Szechuan or Hunanese, and remember a time when SE Asian did not automatically mean a heavy dose of sugar with the chiles.

It continually astonishes us that over the last thirty years, less than a thousand sloppy restaurateurs have managed to cement the Bay Area reputation of Asian cuisines in the minds of an entire generation of younger diners, as cheap, greasy, and cheaper still. 

Thus, the current Asian cuisines in an area proportionately heavy with Asians are often unsatisfying to us. We have barely stuck a toe into the fusion arena, and in truth have only done so because so many Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese restaurants have slid into a level of mediocrity so appalling, we'd rather have pizza or a burger than such indifferent Asian food.

When you consider we ate Chinese food between two and four times a week for almost twenty years when living in San Francisco's Richmond district in the 1970's and '80's, you begin to understand why we continually bemoan the sad state of Chinese restaurants in the East Bay. Carlos and I have wide-ranging tastes, but when push comes to shove, Chinese food is our personal favorite. 

Thus, we are inclined to be tolerant of China Village/Albany, reviewed Jan 2014 and Aug 2013, because we are rooting for Chef John Yao to succeed in raising the bar. If he cared about his Cantonese dishes as much as he does the Hunan side of his menu, we'd haunt the place. As it is, we must sadly accept that we need to ignore our favorite Southern dishes and stick to what he prefers to cook.

We have a similar regard for Zen/Alameda, an Asian fusion tapas restaurant, reviewed March 2013. Again, it isn't perfect, but it riffs creatively off Japanese sushi and Chinese/Korean dishes, with high-quality ingredients. 

Copan/Oakland, just opened and reviewed Dec 2013, does the same in Korean fusion, with a similar hit ratio (although I just found out talented chef Eddie Joo has left the Bay Area, so Copan is turning into a branch of Bowl'd, with menu changes, so we'll need to revisit it). 

In all three of these, we're getting food that is tantalizingly close to what we love. Not exactly what we're searching for, but at least there's high quality ingredients and good execution — and a lot less sugar.

For a brief moment we had an upscale Chinese restaurant, Ching Hua in Alameda, that really rang bells with us. Sadly, we never made it back before they closed (amidst a host of comments that they were "overpriced"), so we remained at a loss for our favorite cuisine. 

And thus we come to Restaurant Chu. A terrible name, a great location, a limited menu of slightly fusion-y Chinese bent. It is a sibling to Kirin/Berkeley on Solano Avenue, and Shen Hua/Berkeley on College Ave. Thus, it is a sibling to the Ching Hua/Alameda restaurant we briefly enjoyed. 

All are owned and managed by executive chef Philip Chu and his wife Dana. Chu has been open since 2009, gathering up-and-down reviews on Yelp, whose bargain hunters are second to none in their endless search for large portions of nearly free food – yes, thus contributing to the image of Chinese restaurants as Havens For The Very Cheap.

The Chus have been fighting this image for a good long time, with varying degrees of success. Their namesake is a contemporary bistro design restaurant. There are no round tables, no lazy susans in the middle. It is very clear this is not where you come for a banquet menu of nine dishes for $80. The waiter was Hispanic (and Manuel was very good indeed). 

The Chinese families don't come here because it isn't authentic and it isn't cheap. The clientele is mostly American, but they're a little tentative about it because a lot of dishes are marked spicy, although the spiciness is no higher than China Village. Like CV, Restaurant Chu keeps the heat mild to moderate, since 95 out of 100 Caucasians who say they like it hot, actually wimp out on anything over a 5/10 on the chile scale. 

I had actually suggested trying Chu over a year ago. Carlos was reluctant to agree, still dubious about the fusion element and the higher prices. After 15 months of increasingly lousy meals at a variety of Asian restaurants, he has finally come over to The Dark Side, and is willing to spend a little more so that he doesn't need to listen to me complain all evening.

We came for lunch, but the dinner menu is also available if desired. They have a nice list of starters, which double as small plates, and that day they also had a very interesting list of five specials. 

I wanted to keep our order modest, because we were going to run a couple of errands afterwards so I couldn't keep food in the car for too long, having neglected to bring an ice pak along.

As it turns out, Chu has very generous portions. We ordered two starters and two dishes, and ended up bringing one of the starters home almost completely uneaten! The starters were as big as the regular dishes, and the regular dishes are a very generous portion for one. In fact, a regular dish could easily be split by two people, considering that Chu gives each diner a free small bowl of soup to start.

Carlos was very happy that this was hot and sour soup. He likes almost any version of it, even the bad ones. I always find this amusing as he normally loathes vinegar, which is an essential ingredient for this recipe! Chu's version was a little on the salty side from a good quality soya, but overall was excellent. I even liked it, and hot and sour is never my favorite. 

This had all the essentials: good tofu, slices of black mushroom, shredded bamboo shoot, lots of black fungus, aka cloud's ear (a good sub for the dried lily buds which are traditional but expensive) and surprisingly, some pickled vegetables adding some ooomph. It could have used a good dollop more of chile oil, but was otherwise an excellent rendition of an often-abused classic.

Next came a special of oxtail dumplings. We love both oxtails and dumplings, but we hadn't seen the two together before. Based on what we got, every Chinese restaurant worth their wok should be doing this. If you're tired of ground meat so bland you can't tell whether it's beef or pork or lamb or chicken, just replace it with a superior braised oxtail seasoned with anise. 

Cooked until the meat fell off the bones, shredded and stuffed with natural juices into dough skins shaped into the Tibetan/Northern Chinese mo-mo style dumplings, these eight yummies were 4.5 stars all the way. The rich oxtail flavor jumped out, the seasonings accenting the meat but not overwhelming it (referring to China Village's braised pork getting snowed under an onslaught of five spice after a couple of days sitting around). We're deducting a half-star only because the tops of the dumplings were a little tough and chewy, but the skins themselves were thin and well-filled. 

Then we received a bowl of dan dan mein. This takes various forms in different restaurants. We were accustomed to the "dry" style, so the "wet" style at China Village threw us off. The spicing at CV is superior to Chu, but we like Chu's better overall. The handmade noodles here aren't quite as good as CV's, but they're better than restaurants using cheap dried spaghetti.

The sauce is looser than our "dry" version but not at all soupy. It's got a good amount of ground pork crumbled into it (an American change we approve of). Although it lacks the vaunted Szechuan peppercorns that an authentic version demands, the truth is, neither Carlos or I are so much in love with Szechuan peppercorns that we would insist upon them as a "must have". This sauce might not have been anybody's classic, but it was tasty stuff, with garlic, green onion, finely chopped water chestnuts (very little, thankfully), chile oil and brown bean sauce. The heat was good, too; a solid 5.5/10.

Another special was tofu with beef sauce. This won us over even faster than the dan dan mein. A dish of utter simplicity: custard tofu, sliced and laid out with a simple dark sauce of good soya, garlic, green onion...and hand-chopped beef.

I will digress (sorry, again) here. If you have never had hand-chopped beef, you might not understand the tremendous difference it makes versus using ground beef. First of all, hand-chopped beef is of higher quality. It can be a comparatively cheap cut, but what it can't have is any bit of gristle or tendon. 

Such fibrous stuff can be ground up as it makes little difference in a burger patty. But in hand-chopping, tendon and gristle are fatal. So the meat has to be extremely well-trimmed, meaning a lot of waste is taken off. 

Second, the texture is different. There's no way to adequately describe this; it simply is. It's softer, more tender, rounded instead of squished. The fuller flavor of beef comes out. It's why, for example, beef tartare is absolutely never ground up, but always hand-chopped until finely minced. The technique is what gives it unmistakable flavor. Change the process and you end up with something entirely different.

The custard tofu was absolutely fresh. This is something rightly kept as a special, because this type of tofu spoils faster than any other. You can keep it 2-3 days max, before it spoils. It simply cannot hang around a refrigerator for several weeks, waiting for six or seven tables to use it all up. We adore custard tofu, and prize it because we know how hard it is to find in a restaurant.

The sauce was the perfect example of what Cantonese cooking should be. It was simple, savory, and complemented the tofu without overshadowing it. At first it looked like a lot of sauce, but it turned out to be barely enough. That, too, is a Cantonese philosophy. Like the French, the sauces are all-important, but they are never used to drown a dish. The ideal is to use just enough so that the diner is satisfied, yet left wanting just one more bite. Chu hit the bull's eye smack on-center on this dish. We got a single bowl of rice to share, and if we hadn't had so many other good dishes on the table we might have gotten into a real fight over who would get to finish this one. 

Last but certainly not least, was another special, a dry-fried spicy crispy chicken wing dish. The wings were cut into individual sections, lightly battered (big plus; Carlos loathes the current craze for super-thick crunchy batter coatings), fried and then tossed with a superb chunky sauce that just barely coated the wings. This, too, pleased us because neither of us likes the drippy, goopy style of KFC (Korean fried chicken, of which this is the Chinese equivalent). 

We shared one single drummette just to try it, and were impressed. Because we had so much food, we had this dish packed up to take home. That same night we warmed it slightly and had it with rice. The sauce was masterful; an absolutely brilliant creation. It contained a bit of sugar, just enough to create a glaze on the wings. There was also that excellent soya, plus garlic, ginger, green onion, and the secret ingredient of chopped preserved vegetables. It was salty and savory, tart, mildly hot and only a tiny bit sweet. The wings were good by themselves (it was listed as a starter) but with rice they were sublime. We scraped that container clean to get every speck of finely chopped condiments!

It should be noted that the dish looks hotter than it is. When it arrives, there is a generous amount of stir-fried, blistered red whole chile peppers as well. But the real heat in chile peppers is inside them, in the walls and seeds. So left whole, they're actually quite mild, even though it looks intimidating.

This wasn't a cheap meal, but we easily could have halved the food and had enough. The quality is excellent, the conception is very good, and the execution wowed us. This is Chinese cooking with creativity but also a thorough grounding in classic techniques. 

We are already planning to return. Chu's been around for a few years; we hope they can hang on and get some momentum going. Over the dinner table, as Carlos and I were finishing off an impromptu Chinese meal featuring those leftover chicken wings, we both agreed we really, truly miss good Chinese food that is nearby us. We're hoping that Restaurant Chu will fill that hole for us: our fingers are crossed!

Tea is good, not great, quality. You have a choice of green, oolong, or black. We chose oolong, which turned out be Iron Buddha's Hand. It's served in a square tetsubin, the Japanese cast iron teapots. You don't get much; barely enough for one of us, and each teapot is $5.

Two people, lunch (enough for four if we'd gotten two rice bowls instead of just one): Two starters, two dishes – but everything was pretty much the same size – plus one rice bowl, one teapot, with tip was $73. Worth every penny, and then some!