Mystery Critic
The Best Restaurants Out There - And Much More!
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The Kitchen 厨房制造 - Millbrae 
OVERALL If you know anything about Millbrae, you'd know that it's the capital of Hong Kong style seafood restaurants in the Bay Area, and this place is another newborn superstar. It's interesting because there aren't really that many Hong Kong people there and it's obviously nowhere close to the ocean. The Kitchen (what's with the creative name....) is actually at the original location of Hong Kong Flower Lounge, so maybe that distinct taste and skill for seafood is preserved there.... Look around you when you enter this place and you'll see SEAFOOD all around you - on the tables and in the fish tanks. But this place is more than seafood - it's an all-around solid restaurant with high-quality meats and starch dishes too. Even the "daily soup" and "flat noodle in abalone sauce" were excellent. We also had great "fat beef brisket with goose instestine in XO sauce" and it was fabulous. Many people also ordered meat combo appetizer with roasted piglet. Yeah, they sound gross and cruel, but Chinese people are cruel when it comes to food so accept it and enjoy. Be sure to get dishes with "fish puffs". It's a rather simple thing - tastes like egg puffs with fish paste. Nevertheless, it's too good to miss - with anything! We tried a "fish skin / fish puff / cucumber / beancurd skin (not sure what its official English name is)" dish and man, those fish puffs are good and so was the soup. We also tried their dimsum the other day - it's very, very good, but unfortunately its neighbors are also good and the wait here is simply TOOOOO long (because it's not all that big). No Hong Kong-style restaurant is really bad service, but at a place that you have to line up outside at 8pm on MONDAY to get a table, the incentive to impress you is from minimal to non-existent. The service is professional nevertheless - efficient, courteous and orderly, kind of like an engineering releasing a product. You do want to be patient - it's so HOT that sometimes it's hard to get the staff's attention. I sound like a broken record when it comes to describing the ambience of Chinese restaurants because that what they are - uniformly boring and lack of any taste whatsoever. The only difference between this one and other is that it has several big screen LCD TVs hung on the ceiling - playing network show like Monday night football. So appropriate for a Chinese seafood restaurant don't you think? One of the reasons why this place is packed is because of its return on investment. Oh man, those $10 might be expensive compared to some of the shacks around it, but the quantity is reasonable and quality is downright excellent. So why go to Hong Kong Flower Lounge for smaller portion and high prices? BOTTOMLINE Those who stopped reading at the Food section because of the names of the dishes I mentioned will suffered a great lost opportunity for fantastic culinary adventure. With cooks who know what they are doing, even the house fried noodles are good that this place, so would the other familiar dishes be. Of course it won't hurt to try the "thousand-year preserved eggs with fish puff and baby bokchoy"..... BTW This place has "sibling" restaurants in Richmond and Sacramento, but even the menu says that this one is the best (they call it a "model restaurant in the chain business"). Therefore I'd be careful with trying the others. Also, as I mentioned, this place is RED HOT. Arrive early or late, never at 6:30pm without reservation.
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