Last month I was driving home in Pasadena and saw four Chinese characters lit up on the side of a restaurant building. Which was weird cause that’s been an American brunch restaurant for the last five years. Since then I’ve been driving by it and keep seeing Chinese people dining in the restaurant.
Last Tuesday Bradley Lai posted about the restaurant, Colette. I messaged him immediately and told him we needed to gather some people and attack the menu for dinner. I looked up their yelp page and they are still using the same yelp page as the American brunch restaurant but slowly more and more reviews of the Chinese restaurant are intermingling in.
I can confidently say that this is one of the best Cantonese Restaurants I’ve eaten at in Los Angeles. Full stop. Every Cantonese dish we ate was the best version of that dish I’ve had in Los Angeles. There were so many things we wanted to order but the manager told us to slow it down. From what I’ve been told by others - the chef is the old chef from Embassy Kitchen.
Note – I’ve started to nibble/ eat seafood in 2023. Not outright eating plates of fish but a few bites here and there. Trying to leave it to worthwhile meals to get a sense of a restaurant. But still no land mammals.
Szechuan Style Chicken Salad - obviously not Cantonese. everyone said the chicken was perfectly cooked. I found the sauce to be deep, sweet, nutty and most importantly spicy! One of the diners complained the sauce was a bit too sweet.
Crispy Stuffed Chicken - air dried crispy chicken skin with shrimp paste. Comments from others at the table - best rendition they’ve had.
Curry beef brisket - delicious curry - that classic mala influence you have at Cantonese cafe curry but amped up a few notches. I could have eaten eight bowls of rice with it.
BBQ pork bun - they do fresh-to-order steamed dim sum for lunch and dinner! For my daughter. She wouldn’t share it with anyone. So I guess that means it was good.
Salted egg pumpkin - awesome. Awesome. So much salted egg. So savory. So good. Maybe cut the pumpkin slightly smaller but otherwise delicious.
Red snapper cooked very well. The seafood soy sauce was great. I was just eating the scallions by themselves dipped in the sauce. The table polished off two of them.
Herbal chicken soup with pear - chicken soup for the soul. Loved it.
Here are the showstoppers
Dungeness crab in curry - perfectly cooked crab over a bed of crispy vermecilli and curry.
Lobster with sticky rice - this is the most perfectly cooked lobster I have had at a chinese restaurant in America. John was giving his thing about how lobster shouldn’t be bothered to be eaten outside of New England but even this he was impressed by. The sticky rice coating was just the icing on the cake. Or rice on the lobster?
Chiu chow style beef stew on crispy pan fried vermicelli - That sauce. The juxtaposition of crunchy and soft noodle.
Finally. Walnut dessert soup with sesame rice ball - capped off a great dinner with a beautiful nutty sweet soup.
