Chin's

Last weekend, Bert and I had the pleasure of having "Chinese Breakfast" at Chin's with three awesome foodbloggers - Kirk from MMM-Yoso, Captain Jack of San Diego Restaurant Reviews and Michael from Foodopolis. Chin's is a Chinese restaurant located in the Holiday Inn Select in Mira Mesa (corner 0f Miramar Road and Kearny Villa Road). It used to be a Marie Callendar's by the way. You'll have to forgive my lack of knowledge on the proper names of these dishes. I'm having trouble doing links with this computer but I'll fix them soon. But off the top of my head, the dish above are sliced rice cake (I thought it was water chestnuts, duh for me) with pork and mustard greens, which I really liked.The dish you see below is thinly sliced 5-Spice Beef. This was one of my favorites. The sauce was so good - We ended up taking home the leftovers for future sandwiches. As you will see, there was a variety of dishes, thanks to Kirk's expertise and familiarity with the menu.I believe this was the Smoked Fish, which actually deep fried and then marinated. There were a lot of bones (which are edible if you choose to do so) in this. I only had a few bites - it was a bit too salty for me.

This a a type of Chinese unleavened bread, filled with thinly sliced beef (not sure if it was 5-Spice). Wait, I looked it up. It's called Shao Bing with Braised Beef.

Cold Roasted Duck. The sauce tasted like the 5-spice beef.

Here's the Pickled Mustard Greens and Shredded Pork Noodle Soup. I didn't taste this in the restaurant that day because I'd grazed on the other items and was already full. I did partake in in the next day and enjoyed the mustard greens. I like bitter!

(9/11/08 - Correction - This is Wuxi Sparerib Soup) The Niu Rou Mein Beef Noodle Soup was a favorite as well. Bert thought it a bit sweet. In fact Kirk said some places serve it sweeter. Ooh, don't know if I'd dig that. What I really liked besides the tasty and rich broth was the shortrib pieces that were in there. If I could have chosen just one thing to eat, this would have been it. Below are Xiao Long Bao (aka "XLB" - I learned a new term that day) - these are dumplings filled with meat and soup. I've had dumpling before but never ones with soup inside. By the time I ate mine, the soup had already cooled. You are supposed to perch the dumpling on top of your soup spoon and bite off the top to let the steam escape and then eat it whole.

Kirk ordered steamed buns. Not sure if this was the first set or the second. The first set were smaller and filled with sweet yellow beans. Turns out they served us the wrong one so it was sent back. The yellow bean ones were supposed to be a dessert. Only a few of us ate it.

This was the second set of steamed buns which were filled with pickled mustard greens. This was kind of unusual (for me). This was just like a siopao (a type of Chinese influenced Filipino steamed bun filled with pork and hard boiled eggs), but with bitter mustard greens. Very different, but it was pretty good.

In all, it was a very cool meeting fellow food bloggers that I admire. Even though I hadn't met any of them before, it felt like we already knew each other (through our posts and whatnot). It was also cool to place a face with the names/personas behind the blogs. Everyone was pretty much down to earth and easy to talk to. It was fun listening to everyone talk in depth about food.

I learned a lot about Chinese cuisine, red ants imparting the sour flavor in a fermented fish sauce (Kirk's latest post), oysters, and other stuff I can't remember. That was my first "Chinese Breakfast" by the way. Perhaps we shall have another food gathering at another venue!