Empire Chinese

Originally Published in Portland Press Herald around 2010 from past premiere of blog, Food for Thought, C 2002 or Thereabouts

December 16, 2021 / / Restaurants

Originally “Food for Thought” was created as a food diary–a blog with daily entries about my personal focus on local food, farms and restaurants in Portland when the term locavore was new to the lexicon and blogging was a quirky endeavor. It first appeared online at Downeast Magazine in around 2001 and later commissioned by an enterprising editor at the Portland Press Herald where it ran for years until it morphed into the Golden Dish.

For better or worse, the space quickly became focused on restaurant reviews, a shaky moment for some or a stellar  time for others.

It was exciting to eat my way through Portland’s restaurant renaissance.  Suddenly it was no longer just Back Bay Grill and Fore Street as keepers of the flame but rather newcomers like Five Fifty Five, Bandol, Caiola’s, Hugo’s, Cinque Terre, Vignola and Duck Fat joined the group if only to make the old guard strive to be better.

Below are some photos from the past of dining in Portland, most around 2015-2016, as far back as my current Photoshop catalogue goes.

Five-fifty Five back in the day 2015 and much earlier in the early aughts

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Ultimate Asian in Portland: Authentic, Extraordinarily Exciting Flavors Define Sichuan Kitchen’s Incredible New Menu

July 6, 2019 / / Restaurants

Sichuan Kitchen eschews the high-style interiors of other highly regarded Asian restaurants in town such as Empire Chinese Kitchen, Miyake Restaurants and Bao Bao. Even with their exalted interiors, the latter also provide authentic Asian cooking. Whereas Sichuan Kitchen remains low key, even as a plain Jane dining abode without the hyperbolic elements that the others provide.  But once you dig in, that’s when it takes off—into thoroughly exotic territory with Sichuan spices, pickled vegetables and sauces   exceeding the umami norm.

This was one of my favorite dishes, sliced beef in chili sauce

When you walk into Sichuan Kitchen what you see is a randomly plain dining room, comfortable without making a statement and you notice that the diners at their tables are not there for the usual visual show of “dining out” but are instead deep into the food that they’re eating.  It’s not terribly noisy there because mouths are chewing rather than chatting smartly. It reminds me of New York’s new wave of Szechuan restaurants that populated the Upper West Side in the 1970s, surpassing the Cantonese meccas of the city’s Chinatown.  Chinese cooking was finally evolving then beyond the column menus of egg foo young and sweet and sour pork.  The cooking of China’s regional fare was making a big play then and we’ve never looked back except in backwaters like Portland where it took a few decades to get beyond chopped suey houses.

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Dining In And Out: Choices in Portland Abound, from Plain and Simple to the Sublime

August 31, 2018 / / Restaurants

From the venerable Empire Chinese to Forage, Chaval, Pai Men Miyake, Little Giant, Evergreen Chinese, The Shop and dinner at home under the auspices of Martha Marley Spoon home delivery, it was a pretty good several weeks of dining in and out.

Martha-Marley Spoon. I started subscribing to Martha’s home delivery a few months ago, and once a week for $48 for 4 servings I receive dishes of my choice from a long menu list.  For the most part the food is good: very fresh, either natural or organic ingredients, and most of the preparations are very similar: main dishes of meat, chicken or things like tacos or flatbreads along with various vegetable dishes.  The prep list is somewhat complicated, though nothing takes more than 30 minutes to prepare and cook.  The delivery, however, is erratic, coming a day late and the freezer packs are perilously close to thawing out.  Still it’s an A- service and I’ve enjoyed most of the meal plans.  ***1/2

Seared steak with ginger butter and oven-baked fries and green beans

Empire Chinese. It’s still the best of our Chinese cuisine dining options.  Authentic Cantonese dishes, including dim sum, are beautifully prepared.  It’s one of my favorite restaurants in Portland. ****1/2

Kung pao chicken

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The Perfect Meal: Empire Chinese Still Reigns As One of Portland’s Most Popular Restaurants–and For Good Reason!

May 15, 2017 / / Restaurants

To chronicle—not to review—how a restaurant can maintain its favorable standing in Portland’s restaurant community, one has only to look at Empire Chinese as a paradigm of consistency.  Since opening in the fall of 2013, they have maintained a standard rarely achieved by restaurants in Greater Portland over so long a period.  Most places have their ups and downs; even our best Eurocentric restaurants can  have a bad night.  But in my countless visits to Empire since Day One, I’ve yet to have a meal that wasn’t superb.

Scene stealers at Empire 

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Briefly Noted: 5-Star Picks of the Week, from the simple to sublime

September 23, 2016 / / Restaurants

After all of its preparatory time you’d think that the new iteration of El Rayo, which opened on Free Street earlier this week, would have managed to include dinner service in its debut.  Instead, for now, it’s breakfast and lunch only, as though we all want a burrito to start our day.  I have an open mind about the new restaurant (it looks great inside), but I never considered it much of a contender in the  Mexican cuisine category beyond the  Americanization of its menu serving ersatz south-of-the border grub.

For now, then, I’m offering a multi-review of Portland eateries since there’s nothing that compelling to write about in the new and novel category. In fact, I had an interesting mix of dishes all week, including breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Moody's Indian pudding

Moody’s Indian pudding

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Woodford Food and Beverage: Three visits in three days and still counting–It’s a winner

January 22, 2016 / / Restaurants

Portland is, after all, a very small city but one whose cause and effect stir the pot when anything new or different comes along.  Our dining scene is a prime example.  As soon as a new restaurant opens, the local pundits pounce hard and fast to get their words out there immediately, and diners follow suit to flood these new eateries enthusiastically.   I include myself in the crowd, though I hope what I have to report and posit are meaningful.  That said, the newly opened—and at this writing the restaurant is just days old—Woodford Food and Beverage—has made the obligatory splash.  (See my earlier Preview write up).

The WFB dining room bar on opening night; lower right, the corner banquette

The WFB dining room bar on opening night; lower right, the corner banquette

It’s the first new restaurant on the scene in 2016 but not far behind two other bright new stars, Terlingua and Roustabout.  The latter two have carved out a niche along Washington Avenue. And there’s more coming on the avenue, too, with Maine and Loire expanding its reach (Drifter’s Wife, a wine bar) and a café and chocolate bar, A Lively Palate.

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Bao Bao still worth all of the bows, bowls and buns

January 8, 2016 / / Restaurants

The Sunday dinner menu at Bao Bao was not, as I thought, a more varied affair with bigger multi-course offerings going beyond the restaurant’s signature dumplings.  I was, I admit, wrong to assume otherwise since nowhere on its website did it give that impression. Yet differentiating it from its regular menu as “Sunday dinner” implied a broader range of dishes.

It didn’t.  And our table of four, however, was hardly disappointed with what we ate, though we all expected it to be, well, fuller.

The dining room and bar at Bao Bao

The dining room and bar at Bao Bao

Chef Cara Stadler’s Bao Bao is a dumpling house in the strictest sense. (Interestingly the kitchen does not prepare—as the restaurant’s name suggests—the typical Chinese buns known as cha sui bao or pork buns; yet “bao” literally means wrapped treasure and not necessarily referring to buns.)

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First Look: Veranda Noodle House–good enough in a convenient Old Port location

January 1, 2016 / / Restaurants

Usually   any new restaurant to open in Portland gets loads of attention from the press, food sites and the swirl of food-buzz types who predictably show up on day one especially if there’s a rising star or publicity-hungry chef in the kitchen.  But Veranda Noodle House has bucked the trend, keeping a low profile since opening just before Thanksgiving in the former Salt Exchange space on Commercial Street.

Rear dining room

Rear dining room

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Empire Chinese celebrates two years running as the best Chinese restaurant in Maine

September 18, 2015 / / Restaurants

When Empire Chinese joined the ranks of Portland’s established hierarchy of Asian restaurants—Thai, Japanese and fusion–it had this distinction: it was serving authentic Cantonese fare in contrast to a wasteland of Americanized  Chinese cooking typically found in strip mall and take out joints everywhere  in Maine.  Granted, some were better than others, but lackluster was the key component coming out of these lesser kitchens.

The dining crush last winter

The dining crush last winter

It’s been two years since Empire opened, and in that time they’ve succeeded in setting the standard for some of the best Chinese food north of Boston.  It didn’t try to be a fusion powerhouse like Mission Chinese in New York or Meyers and Chang in Boston.  But the chefs, under the direction of co-owner Theresa Chan, take on nontraditional dishes as well.  Consider their brioche char siu bao (baked pork buns) or spicy cucumber with jelly fish salad as examples–two must-have dishes.

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Where to eat now, where to go next and a few dining conundrums in Portland

August 10, 2015 / / Discoveries, Restaurants

After a scintillating dinner at Tempo Dulu Saturday night, one of nearly bacchanalian proportions, everywhere else I ate last week was so tame (though pretty good) by comparison. (Shown on the intro page is mixologist’s Trevin Hutchins Wayang Cocktail)

A trio of desserts at Tempo Dulu

A trio of desserts at Tempo Dulu

Last night’s options, however, were a mixed bag of where to eat since many favorite places are closed on Sundays, a mistake perhaps if restaurateurs are looking for the big dollars from the brigade of tourists now everywhere in Portland.

I considered going to Sur-Lie, but they close down for Sunday dinner after serving their very popular brunch earlier in the day.

Chef Matt Ginn's terrific lamp preparation at Evo enjoyed on earlier occasionis

Chef Matt Ginn’s terrific lamp preparation at Evo enjoyed on earlier occasionis

Ebb and Flow, on teeming Commercial Street, is also closed on Sundays and I haven’t been there in a long while.  Same for Tiqa.  Keeping with the growing Mediterranean theme gaining popularity, I considered stopping at Evo but parking anywhere in the congested Old Port that night was difficult.

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