I was really excited to try this place because I love Hainan chicken rice, but the experience in all was just okay. That being said, there's not a whole lot of places I know of where you can get chicken rice near Brookline, so it wasn't a total loss and I may come back in the future if I had a craving. One thing to note is that the menu here is HUGE. Like probably 8 or more pages long. There were so many options and some of them seemed strange for an Asian menu (like seafood pasta or other pasta bake items), but there definitely is variety. Still, after looking through the menu for a good five to ten minutes, there weren't a whole lot of items I really wanted to try. In the end, I ordered the chicken rice and an appetizer of salt and pepper calamari:
Hainan Chicken Rice ($17.50) - The price for this dish is absolutely astounding. I'd expect chicken and rice to be maybe $12 or $15 at most, but the price here seems disproportionate to the ingredients. Still, this came out extremely quick (it seems like they have this ready to go at any time) - maybe in less than 5 minutes from ordering. The chicken itself was moist and flavorful, and I really did like the ginger scallion oil that it game with. However, the peanuts seemed unnecessary and the huge mound of rice was fairly dry and lacked the flavor and fat that I tend to enjoy with chicken rice. It was also yellow and tasted a bit like curry which threw me off a little bit. The chicken was the star here though - I'd come back for this chicken because it's hard to get a flavorful and moist chicken with the soy sauce flavor embedded in the silky meat outside of Chinatown or Quincy (or maybe Watertown?). The rice, while not my favorite, was also a huge portion - I ordered an appetizer because I thought the chicken rice wouldn't be enough to fill me, but it came with probably 1.5-2 servings of rice. I was definitely full just on this dish, so if I returned I'd only get the chicken rice next time and skip the appetizer
Salt and Pepper Squid ($10.95) - So the weird thing about this is that we ordered this snack at the same time as the chicken rice, but it took maybe 20 minutes or so to make - it actually didn't even come out until we had both finished our chicken and only had a few scoops of rice left on our plate, which was very strange and definitely not something I would have wanted. When it did finally come out, we were pretty full but decided to try a few bites of this anyway since we love this dish at other places. Unfortunately, every single piece of squid was massively overcooked. The batter was nice and a bit on the salty side, but not terrible, but the squid itself was like rubber or leather. I tried to bite a piece in half and took 15 seconds trying to rip it with my teeth only to give up and shove the whole thing in my mouth, which then took extra time to chew through the protein. If they had cooked this for less time, the flavor and batter would have been great, but it was almost inedible with how tough the squid was.
All in all, I have to give some grace because this restaurant recently opened up in Brookline, but there were some pretty big areas for improvement. The price of the chicken rice is a lot higher than I'd like, and the fact that the snack/appetizer only came out after we had nearly finished our mains was very weird. We had actually thought that they had forgotten about the order and were getting ready to leave before it came out, and then on top of that it was incredibly hard to eat because it had been overcooked by a degree of several minutes. The last critique is that some tables were given water pitchers, but we finished our waters and waited 10 minutes or so for a refill, eventually having to flag down someone to get our waters filled even while the restaurant had some empty tables.
HOWEVER, the chicken itself was very good, and the ginger scallion oil was also tasty. I can see myself coming back just for that or ordering takeout of just the chicken without the rice in a pinch. 3/5 - but there's definitely potential for this to be raised to a 4 after they've been open for some time and get into a rhythm service-wise. read more