This delivery experience started off well. My order arrived earlier than expected and piping-hot. I was excited to try it! The food smelled pretty good when I first opened the large rectangular container and watched the steam pouring out. They definitely packed in a good amount of food in that container.
Between those initial factors and the better than average Yelp reviews, I was hopeful that I had finally found a good Chinese food delivery option in Brooklyn. They are SO hard to find. But I should have known better, I've done the whole hopey-changey Chinese food delivery thing before. It always ends up in disappointment, heartburn, and that yucky taste in your mouth. However well this journey had begun, the food quickly disabused me of any notion that this was going to be some serendipitous discovery of a magical fast-food delivery unicorn.
For my part, I made the mistake of ordering something that I rarely order - General Tso's chicken. This popular Americanized version of a non-existent traditional Chinese entree is both difficult to properly execute and gastronomically questionable for its thick sweet-sauce that likely includes 47 different types of unnatural sugars. I was not making a healthy choice here, in a multitude of ways. But hey, sometimes bad food can be so very good, right?
I got the lunch special so it came with pork fried rice and an egg roll. The egg roll tasted oily and metallic on the inside. Two bites of that and I should have realized right then that mushiness was going to be a theme in that afternoons culinary experience. The chicken pieces used in the General Tsos were those extra-large chunks that inevitably get undercooked so you're left with that gross under done chicken taste/texture coupled with the soggy breading on the outside. (Why do so many places not realize that simply using smaller pieces of chicken that are cooked until the breading is slightly crispy helps prevent this off-putting texture/taste problem??) Sadly, the pork fried rice was also unremarkable, especially the chunks of oddly colored dried pork bits they threw in.
(Full disclosure: I always find the lunch special pairing of pork fried rice with absolutely everything else on the menu to be odd. How did it become common-sense that people always want derivative prefab pork chunks in their lunch? Just seems odd to me.)
So I was stuck in the dining conundrum that is the food delivery world. There is no easy way to rectify this situation. It's a bad WWE matchup. It's, "This Food Tastes Gross" versus "I Gotta Eat Something" - problematic analogy aside, there are no winners here. I went with trying to eat what I could using the 'picking' strategy. Even that failed. I felt myself becoming more grossed out with each successive bite. Alas, I threw out the twice bit egg roll and the last two-thirds of the container concoction. I had no choice, my stomach was turning on me like Ramsay Bolton's dogs.
Maybe their other food is better, I'll probably never know, but this particular meal was Just. Not. Good.
P.S. it should be noted that everything positive that justifies the 1-star rating was stated within the first paragraph. That's it. There were no other strengths. I can't even give them points for proportional provision of dining accoutrements - there were too many duck sauce packets, not enough soy sauce, 2 mini-napkins, and a plastic knife...no fork. I think 1-Star is probably more than fair. read more