During my party years, I went to Hing Loon a lot.
It was one of those places that opened until really late at night.
I had fond memory of Hing Loon from way back in the early 90’s, when they were one of the few edible Chinese food restaurants in Seattle Chinatown when I freshly came from Hong Kong.
My favorite had been the salt and pepper fried chicken wings — fried to crisp, well-flavored with garlic and fresh chilies, meat was tender, always a treat.
I liked their wings the best — some places made it soggy, some places did not have enough flavors (plain fried wings), and they seemed to find the perfect balance.
It used to be my destination wing stop!
When I passed by couple months ago I noticed the English name of the restaurant had changed to New Hing Loon, although the Chinese name stayed the same, the place had likely changed hands.
We went with friends anyway for late dinner and really hoping that my favorite would stayed the same!
Verdict was – it was good, but not as good as before.
The flavors were there, but I believe they coated it with some flour now, so there was pockets of coating instead of plain crisp skins.
It was still a light coating, just not the same. Alas!
The fried rice was a little bland and not dry enough.
We also had “west lake” beef soup.
It had tender beef and soft tofu with floral cilantro.
It was delicious and exactly how I knew it.
We got Mongolian beef which was very tender but overly salted.
Pea vine was fresh but the fried tofu dish with enoki mushroom was super salty.
The tofu was fried crisp with steaming hot egg tofu inside, but I couldn’t taste the enoki mushroom sauce much aside from salt.
I did not recall that they had a problem with salt levels before, hopefully that would be fixed and they could deliver consistently salted food.
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Spicy Black Cod
This dish is so simple to make it is practically a cop-out on cooking!
Yet, it is delicious and has the added benefit to introduce healthy fermented foods in the body.
Both Japanese miso and the Korean pepper paste were fermented and, the primary flavors of this dish.
INGREDIENTS
1 black cod fillet (half the fish)
1.5 tbsp. miso
1/3 tbsp. Korean fermented pepper paste
1 tbsp. sake
1 tbsp. hot water
white peppers
DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 380F.
Pat dry fish fillet and sprinkled white pepper generously.
Mix miso, pepper paste, sake and hot water together until melted and smooth.
Spread the paste on top of the fish fillet evenly.
Bake for 8 mins.
Change the setting to Broil for 1-2 minutes.
I have used this recipe on salmon and it worked beautifully as well.
Enjoy!