The Order:
It’s been raining all week, so we’ve been ordering food all week. Today, it stopped raining but we kept ordering. This time, the restaurant of choice was Mooncake Foods. After great success in Soho, this small so-called “Asian diner” opened a second location in Chelsea/Midtown. This means they now deliver to the SeamlessWeb offices and after a quick look over the wide variety of dishes, AnnMarie and I settled on Miso-Glazed Salmon and Shanghai-Style Short Ribs, along with the Crawfish Dumplings appetizer. Ordering from here for the first time, I was a little surprised by some non-traditional Asian menu options like the Smoked White Fish Salad Sandwich, but even there they gave the dish an Asian spin by including pickled carrots and daikon. On the downside, they don’t offer real Chinese mooncakes here.
The Meal:
We got the food in a quick and orderly fashion (and with extra spicy green sauce to boot). It sounds simple, but as we all know, you can’t always take that for granted.
The Crawfish Dumplings were fairly large and had plenty of meat. A good start. The Short Ribs weren’t exactly what I was expecting, but if I had googled “Shanghai-style short ribs” I probably would have been less surprised to see this:
Taste-wise, the ribs were excellent. They weren’t the easiest thing to eat with a plastic knife and fork, but the meat was tender and the sauce added some great flavor that was a little sweet and spicy. My one complaint was all those sprouts that came with the dish. Were they really necessary? I know that restaurants think it’s nice to include a few extra vegetables or salad (see AnnMarie’s salmon below) with a dish, but I just don’t think that a lot of people eat that stuff and if I had known about it on the menu, I would have asked them not to include it.
AnnMarie’s Miso-Glazed Salmon is one of Mooncake’s most popular dishes and it’s good piece of fish, but she thought it should have had more of that miso glaze. Guess she’ll have to take that one up with the free market that thinks otherwise. However, unlike me, she was pleasantly surprised by her extra salad, including the mysterious orange dressing that comes with every Asian salad:
All in all, Mooncake Foods was an interesting experiment in Asian cuisine and one I think we were happy to have undertaken. The food was high quality, seemingly healthy, and reasonably priced. Sounds like a place we’ll be ordering from again at some point.
FYI – We’re located near Bryant Park in case you want to try Mooncake Foods for yourself or give us recommendations for future orders!