Sunday, January 15, 2012

Chef Hung

Andy, Connie and I went to Diamond Plaza for dinner and we ended up at Chef Hung. It is a Taiwanese beef noodle place next to 85°C Cafe/Bakery. When we walked in at 5:30pm, the place was probably 75% full but there was no host/hostess. A bunch of customers, including us, stood around for 5 minutes before anyone came to seat us (actually hand out numbers). In the meantime, there was a verbal altercation between these two older fobby Chinese guys and one younger maybe-ABC guy about who was next in line. The younger guy was actually pretty rude; he ended up sitting next to us and was moody and rude to the waiter as well.

Anyway, I got the "famous" beef noodles. It was okay... nothing spectacular. The menus and place-mats made sure you know that "Chef Hung" won many beef noodle awards but I think my mom's version is better. Another issue was the prices. Maybe the rent is expensive in Diamond Plaza because the bowls of noodle weren't cheap. My medium sized bowl was ~$10. We ordered drinks and a few side dishes in addition to a main item; the bill came out to ~$50. If I had to give it a Yelp rating (forgot to do it while I was there), I'd give it 3.5 stars. Taking prices into consideration, I would probably drop it down to 2.5 stars.


There was a motorized bowl of noodles at the entrance of the restaurant. It was pretty cool... too bad there was no employees to seat us.


My $10 bowl of noodles. In addition to the bigger chunks of beef, they also had thin strips, kind of like the meat you get in a beef bowl at Yoshinoya. I've never seen this before, even in Taiwan.


Nothing to do with Chef Hung but upstairs in the plaza, there was a photo-sticker place. Not one machine but an entire store packed with machines. I took some of these kind of photos with Shirley a long long time ago.

==========

In contrast, $20/person got us AYCE Korean BBQ at Gen, near Newport and Main in Tustin. Mmm... I was not hungry for 24 hours afterwards.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

are you hung? [chinese man looks down at his waist and says] "can't complain"

my favorite line is wiseguy.

i got the same bowl of noodles. i actually really like the thin strips of beef and would order a bowl with all this meat. it was over-priced. the other weird thing was the menus they handed out were really ratty. they didn't use good paper and the menus we had were all ripped up. really gave a bad impression. i would go again if you are buying.

looks like Richard Gere should be a Random Thoughts reader:
http://shanghaiist.com/2012/01/12/richard_gere_china_the_largest_hypo.php

in Taiwan for another day before i go behind the GFW. happy Taiwan new year.