It may be several months late, but the San Gabriel Sheraton finally opened up its Chinese restaurant. And it wasn’t the Mainland Chinese restaurant from Sichuan, Ba Shu Feng, which was scuttled when the chefs couldn’t get visas to come to the United States. Rather, it’s Opal, which offers “high-quality, sophisticated Cantonese cuisine in its purest form.” Restaurant just opened this week, so it’s a work in progress. Indeed there is no real Cantonese food on the lunch menu, which is largely made of non-Chinese dishes. We did have the pork and shrimp dumplings and the Sichuan chicken, which were quite good, and the hot and sour soup and the laksa, which weren’t particularly good. Cantonese dishes appear on the dinner menu, though, but the menu is relatively slim with fewer than two dozen entrees. It does have bird’s nest soup, which you don’t see very often these days, at $38 a bowl. I presume if things go well they’ll expand the menu later with more imaginative dishes. The highlight is a small bowl containing what looks like a large mint. But it isn’t. When you pour water over it and pull it apart, it becomes a wet towelette.
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That towelette trick has been going since the Clinton era.
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I had that recently somewhere in LA. Maybe at Aburiya Raku?
They use that towelette trick at Bistro Na’s in Temple City as well.