Beijing Gardens

Beijing Gardens' menu is online at http://www.beijinggardens.com/

Ordered delivery lunch on a Tuesday from Beijing Garden.  I ordered around 11:00 and put the purchase on my credit card.  The person that took my order was reasonably friendly, a little hard to understand.  It only took about 20 minutes for my food to arrive.  The delivery person wasn't rude, but he didn't say one word to my "hello" or through signing the check or my wish for him to have a nice day.  Could have been worse I guess.

I ordered a small #17, Wonton Soup, #38b, Shrimp Pad Thai and V1, a Vegetarian Spring Roll.  My delivery came with mustard, soy sauce and duck sauce.  I also got a bag of those wide, greasy fried noodles, I'm assuming they were included because of my soup.  They also threw in two fortune cookies.  Sometimes I can tell I've ordered too much food if I get like 5 cookies, but I think 2 is probably standard.

The wonton soup looked mostly typical.  There wasn't anything in the broth besides some scallions though.  Once I cut into the wontons, I felt they were a bit short on meat.  More on a wonton soup experiment in a future post.

A lady I know makes these amazing spring rolls in a moist, rice-paper wrapper.  Sometimes when I order a spring roll I hope for something like that.  Unfortunately, this was more like a regular, fried spring roll with a thin shell.  It wasn't very dark in color, but it was fried and the outside was crispy.  The inside had big pieces of cabbage, carrots and mushrooms.  It was pretty good, actually.  

I ordered the Pad Thai mostly because I'm trying to mix it up.  I can't write about the same meal over and over and part of my purpose with this blog was to enjoy some restaurants and some menu items I might not have otherwise.  So, I don't have a lot of recent Pad Thai experience.  I turned to the interwebs for an idea of what makes a traditional Pad Thai and that is where some of my evaluation comes from here.


The Pad Thai was packed pretty tight in the container.  Lots of noodles and bean sprouts.  One corner of the container was filled with crushed peanuts which are a typical accompaniment.  There was a lemon slice and from what I can tell, lime would have been the more traditional choice.  I did think the lemon was a nice touch though and cut the sweetness of the noodles nicely.    Once I stirred it up I found a good amount of shrimp in the bottom.  The ratio of noodles to shrimp was pretty good.  Mixed in with the noodles and shrimp were some scallions/green onions and egg.  The flavor was sweet and maybe a little sour from the tamarind, but benefited from the lemon that I squeezed over the top and I enjoyed it.   Loved the peanuts, maybe next time I'll ask for extra.



Even with my exhaustive research on Pad Thai, there were some items in the mix I couldn't identify.   I ate one or two and what is pictured here was a little giggly, but easy to bite through. Can someone tell me what that is?Looks a little like an ear, someone suggested it might be pieces of squid - not sure about that one.  There were also a couple other pieces that looked more like beef.  Maybe it's like the buffet at Ponderosa and pieces from the other dishes fall into the nearby containers?


Anyway, I liked the Pad Thai, but maybe shouldn't look at it so closely.  According to my cookies, "All is well."  I'm OK with that.