Food Review – Seattle 09/04/09

Last night Gareth ate Chicken, Beef and Eel.  Has he given up being a vegan?  No, we just went to Bamboo Garden, a Chinese restaurant where everything is vegan apart from the Fortune Cookies.  All the “meat” is made from vegetable protein.

We picked four dishes between the four of us.  We had Sweet and Sour Chicken, Mongolian Beef,  Sauteed Almond and Cashew Nut Chicken and Sauteed Eel.

The Sweet and Sour Chicken was battered “chicken”.  The batter was nice and crispy, and the “chicken” was very tender.  The sauce was sweet but not so much that all you could taste was sugar  It came with some chunky vegetables including pineapple, which added a little bit of sweetness.  The sauce was a good viscosity.

The Mongolian Beef was very tender.  A could level of spiciness that left a little tingle on your tongue.  The sauce was thick but went well with the big pieces of “beef”, onion and pepper.  This came with crispy bean thread noodles, that were tasty when they were softened by the sauce, but when they were eaten on their own they were bland and dried out your mouth.

The Sauteed Almond and Cashew Chicken was very spicy.  There was a lot of nuts in it.  The problem was that due to it being covered in a sauce and everything being about the same size you couldn’t work out what things were until you chewed down on them.

The Sauteed Eel was made out of mushrooms that had been sliced to resemble eel.  The “eel” had the texture of eel but without the fishy taste which sometimes can be over-powering.  It was tender and wasn’t chewy at all.

Having a little bit of everything made the meal good.  My favourite was the Sweet and Sour Chicken.

It was also ridiculously cheap. $16 each for four people sharing four dishes plus rice and drinks.