A First Look At Colette

Not that long ago, almost any new Chinese restaurant opening up in the San Gabriel Valley would be guaranteed large crowds for a period after opening as all the looky loo's passed through to kick the tires.  However, more recently the model seems to be that many people now won't try the newest Chinese restaurant until they hear something good about it.  Consequently most new Chinese restaurants aren't terribly busy when they open up.

Consequently, I was recently stunned when a new Chinese restaurant called Colette opened up in the Hastings Ranch neighborhood of Pasadena, an area which was devoid of decent Chinese food, and within less than a month's time became the most talked about Chinese restaurant in the Los Angeles area.  Indeed the buzz was so loud, and the lines so long, that I figured I would have to wait a while until the furor calmed down before driving crosstown to check it out.  But with so much continuous buzz, I decided that arriving right when they opened at 10:30am on a weekday might be a solution, and that did work.  Indeed, at that early hour, the restaurant was empty.

The kitchen at Colette is run by Peter Lai, who had most recently been chef at the rebooted Embassy Kitchen in San Gabriel, having been recruited from the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong.  At Colette he gets to combine his Hong Kong training with what he picked up in his year at Embassy Kitchen.  We were only able to scratch the surface of the menu at Colette, particularly since due to the early hour of our arrival, we paid too much attention to the dim sum, which was just ordinary.

The signature dish is the crispy stuffed chicken, which has been air dried and stuffed with shrimp paste.  This was one of the famous dishes of the original pre-pandemic Embassy Kitchen which was very popular.  However the Colette version is totally out of this world.

 

Fried rice has been elevated in this black truffle beef fried rice.

Something visual, new and delicious is the almond beef cubes, in a delicious honey/fruit sauce.

 

Simple is delicious with this fried cabbage with bacon.

The dim sum is not bad, but with all the interesting appetizers and entrees on the menu, I would recommend passing on these unless you had a hankering for a particular item.

Many more items remain on the menu for us to check out, though after the dining room started to fill up and looking at the food at the other tables, it certainly looks promising.  I wouldn't be surprised if Colette is the elevated Cantonese restaurant that the San Gabriel Valley and Los Angeles area has never had before.

 

 

 

Chinese Restaurant 8,000 Coming Up - What's A New Restaurant?

 

As I will be hitting the 8000 Chinese restaurant mark this month, I thought this would be a good time to mention my ground rules for what is and isn’t a different restaurant for purposes of determining my restaurant count.  

 

 

So in keeping track of how many Chinese restaurants I’ve eaten at, I need a uniform convention for determining what is a new restaurant.  My primary convention is the restaurant name.  If the name changes it’s a new restaurant.  So if a new owner takes over an existing restaurant, but doesn’t change the name, whether they keep the existing menu and operations or change everything completely, it’s not a new restaurant. 

 

On the other hand if restaurant ownership doesn’t change but the owner changes the name, it’s a new restaurant whether or not anything else changes.  These are the only practical solutions since whether there’s a new restaurant or not shouldn’t depend on how much you know about what’s going on behind the scenes.  

One complication is that it’s not that unusual for the new owner of a restaurant not to change the exterior signage.  After all, that costs money.  For example you will drive by New Qingdao in Alhambra and not realize they’ve been gone for over two years.  And in fact, two subsequent restaurant occupants have decided to leave the old signage up.  For somebody like me who discovers new Chinese restaurants by driving around and looking for new signage, this makes it difficult to meet my goal of maximizing my Chinese restaurant total.  Or when Papa Lu’s Kitchen opened up in the location that I thought was previously occupied by Three’s Kitchen, when we got there we were served drinks in cups that read New Three’s Kitchen.  Which means I missed out eating at a new restaurant that I never knew about.  Oh well.  Unless you actually go in the restaurant and look at the name on the menu, business cards, etc. you might not know you’re at a new restaurant.  

 

Note that adding “New” to the name of an existing restaurant is a common practice, and usually reflects some kind of change of ownership where the original owner does not want to be associated with the new operation.  As such it should count as a new restaurant.  

 

Another tricky area is where an existing restaurant moves to a new location.   If you move next door or down the street, that clearly shouldn’t count as another restaurant.  But at some point, one might not know whether a new location is actually in addition to the old location, or in lieu of the old one.  Again having or not having this kind of detailed information shouldn’t be determinative, so my convention is that if a restaurant shows up in another city, I will treat it as a different restaurant no matter what.   And what if a restaurant shuts down, then subsequently reopens months or years later in the same city?  My convention is to treat it as the same restaurant.

In any specific situation, the use of these conventions could produce the wrong result.  But the most important thing is to have conventions that are consistently followed, in which any specific inaccuracies should cancel each other out in the long run and provide the most accurate count.e

 

For the record, here are the previous milestone Chinese restaurants.

1000 - BoBo China, Niagara Falls NY

2000 - Eat First, Washington, D.C.

3000 - House Fortune, Gaithersburg, MD

4000 - Sun Dou Dumpling House, New York City

5000 - Miu Kee, Falls Church VA

6000 - Zheng Family Garden, New York City

7000 - Dim Sum Inn, Salinas CA