Crowning a restaurant as the “best” Chinese or any other
category of restaurant is a tricky thing, given the subjectivity of such a
determination and the varying tastes among diners. While this is certainly the case in trying to
anoint a best Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, most discussions of the topic
tends to involve the same group of contenders, like Sea Harbour in Rosemead,
Chengdu Taste, Lunasia, King Hua and Szechuan Impression in Alhambra, Newport
Seafood and Mian in San Gabriel, and Din Tai Fung in various mall
locations. (Or if you’re Yelp, then it’s
Americanized restaurants like Sea Dragon, Yang Chow and Wah’s Golden Hen. [Link
to my L.A. Weekly Yelp article.]) However,
the best of the bunch may well be Embassy Kitchen in San Gabriel, located
directly in front of Embassy Billiards pool hall on San Gabriel Blvd., and from
whence it derives its name.
Besides the improbability of Embassy Kitchen being one of
the best Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles despite its status as the Chinese equivalent
of bowling alley dining, equally surprising is the fact that Embassy Kitchen is
still under-the-radar despite having been around for 20 years, making it senior
to all the other top non-Yelp contenders except Newport Seafood, which opened
in San Gabriel a year earlier in 1996.
Embassy Kitchen started as a small adjunct restaurant to the billiard
parlor around 1997, even using the Embassy Billiards moniker. It then moved to the large restaurant space
in front of the billiard parlor around 1999.
Like other top Chinese restaurant contenders Sea Harbour,
Lunasia and King Hua, as well as most all of the other banquet sized Chinese
restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, Embassy Kitchen serves Hong Kong style
cuisine. But aside from that, Embassy
Kitchen diverges from these other Hong Kong style restaurants in many
ways. There are no tanks in the dining
room full of live seafood, nor is the dining room huge, loud or boisterous. There is not a gaudy menu with so many
choices that the menu could be made into a movie, and they gladly take
reservations.
But what distinguishes Embassy Kitchen from the pack is the
food selection. Yes, you will find Cantonese
favorites like rock cod in corn sauce, walnut shrimp, fish maw crab meat soup,
e-fu noodles, and steamed chicken with ginger and scallions, all superbly
prepared. But what you also find at
Embassy Kitchen are two extremes not typically seen at most Hong Kong style
restaurants in Los Angeles—complex dishes that require day in advance ordering
and wonderful homestyle dishes. To some
extent most of these dishes are obscured on the Embassy Kitchen menu as they
are only found on paper inserts on the inside cover of the permanent menu. On the other hand, that might not make much
of a difference, since non-Chinese faces are indeed rare at this
restaurant. There is no nefarious intent
in keeping these dishes in a Chinese language supplement, as the owners
indicate that they just weren’t sure how to accurately describe these dishes in
English.
Perhaps the best exemplar of the complex advance order
dishes is the boneless chicken stuffed with shrimp paste. The chicken skin is light and crispy, the
chicken is tender, and the shrimp paste provides a savory contrast.
Then there’s the tilapia rolls with whole carcass, one of
the most unique and visual dishes you will find at a Los Angeles area Chinese
restaurant, though from a taste point of view the
re-stuffed fish (where the bones are removed and the fish is filled back up
with fish and ground pork) might be a better choice.
One of the special items that does not necessarily need an
advance order is the eight treasures stuffed duck.
Other signature dishes
include the chicken stuffed with sticky rice (a traditional Cantonese dish
still popular in the San Francisco area, but difficult to find in Los Angeles),
and the fried rice with whole Dungeness crab or lobster. Note that all of these dishes are large and
run in the $50 range, and hence are more suited to large parties. Indeed Embassy Kitchen has a larger quotient
of large size tables compared to most other Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles.
At the other end of the
spectrum are the many uncommon homestyle dishes on Embassy Kitchen’s menu. However, be aware that these dishes are not
inexpensive, as there are few items on the Embassy Kitchen menu that are under
$15 and many are $20 or more. But these
dishes are generally well worth the price, particularly when considering the
subtleties and complexities in the flavor of the dishes here. At most popular Chinese restaurants,
experienced diners can discern visually and by taste the main ingredients of a
dish. Yes, this dish contains dried
orange peel, or five spice, or bean paste or fish sauce. But at Embassy Kitchen this is not
necessarily the case. For example, our
party was stumped by the steamed egg with tofu and seafood topping, so we had
to ask them what was in it. They replied
“shrimp roe.” Such ingredients also
explain the higher price point.
Many other down-to-earth, and
seldom seen at restaurant dishes are also real winners. Steamed eggplant with dried scallop and
ground pork may sound fairly pedestrian, but it is one of the best dishes on
the menu, with it seemingly being a mystery how the ground pork can be cooked
in such a light and fluffy manner.
Similarly outstanding but
unlikely dishes include clear rice noodles with cabbage, egg and dried
scallops; stir-fried beef with flour crisp; French style beef stew (which comes
with noodles at lunch time but not at dinner); and imitation shark’s fin with
egg whites.
Many people say that Embassy Kitchen is as close to actually
eating in Hong Kong as you can get in Los Angeles. However, more than any Chinese restaurant in
Los Angeles, Embassy Kitchen’s quality is driven by its owner-chef, Chef Yu,
which probably explains in part its lack of widespread acclaim, with the
stellar reviews of his cooking being offset by pedestrian reviews by diners who
happen to eat there when he isn’t in the kitchen. But in the long run, for those who dine at
Embassy Kitchen on a recurring basis, this is a restaurant, the closest thing
to artisan Chinese cooking that you will find in Los Angeles, that deserves to
be considered among the best Chinese restaurants in the area.
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