Little Fatty

Little Fatty, you have to love the name.  This is the second try at making this location into a good restaurant by taking over the place next door.  Before the space was called Status Kuo.  Now they have two rooms under one roof and one of the rooms is essentially a full bar.  Status Kuo was decent food but the vibe and light in there made you feel like you were in a hospital.

The menu looked good so we decided to check out the next iteration of the restaurant, same owner.  The vibe is much better than before.  Good music, lower lights and like before a fantastic length of the wall open kitchen.  The menu just states the dish with  zero explanation of what each dish is so we asked our server.  We had to pull it out of her. She certainly didn’t seem interested in sharing that information nor did she seem interested in giving us utensils to serve the food when it came to our table.  It seemed that either she was totally miserable in her job or we were complete idiots not knowing what each dish is.  Really not good.

We started with the cauliflower.  Spicy and crispy on the outside and just perfectly cooked inside.  This dish was a big winner. General Tso Cauliflower.  We should have just had that.

With this came the braised pork belly.  Nice presentation and cut like butter so really well prepared but the sauce was so heavy and rich that you couldn’t make out what was in it. It was like a glob of brown liquid.  Super fatty too.

Aha Jiang Mian tasted sour with just another brown liquid thrown on top. I love a good noodle but I couldn’t eat it.

Eggplant.  This was the worst of all the dishes if that is possible.  Not cooked through, couldn’t tell exactly what the sauce was and then of course there was raw garlic on everything.  We sent it back.

Kung Pao Chicken was our last attempt.  I asked a few questions about it and our server was definitely not interested in telling me how the dish was prepared.  We went for it anyway.  Overcooked chicken and everything in the bowl tasted the same.  Even the presentation looks like someone just reached into a few separate bowls of pre-made mess and slopped it into the bowl.

I usually stick to the positive when I write about a restaurant but I can’t help myself here.  The experience was just so bad from top to bottom that I had to share.  I love that the owners were trying to fine-tune and go with something else.  That was smart but the service and the food is so unappealing that they should look to that too.