Revisiting Jia Yan Restaurant

In the midst of chuckles drawn from the hilarity of the menu's English translation, here's some stuff we had at Jia Yan.

That's stir fried cabbage with dried chilli and a sauce that contains fermented beans. The flavour was not bad, growing onto us as we ate and the cabbage didn't taste as undercooked as it initially looked. 

This was suan cai yu where the pickled mustard greens were buried at the bottom of the bowl. The fish was I'm guessing, dory. The cheap and plentiful fish with soft crumbly texture that is commonly found locally. This didn't taste bad even though I generally don't like dory. But the texture was exactly the way it was, almost disintegrating as it was picked up with the chopstick. Those pickled mustard tasted like preserved Szechuan vegetables minus the heat.

Here be boiled dumplings (水餃) with egg, chives and little shrimps (三鲜). These dumplings were pretty juicy and the dominant flavour was the "green-iness" from the chives. Or should I even describe that as verdant? o_O Not bad.

And yeah, we didn't want to skip the lamb/mutton so we ordered some skewers and ribs infused with cumin. And other spices. I need to make comparisons regarding the skewers at this point. Those skewers in Restaurant Manchurian (满族全羊铺) might have cost 50% more but were also better done in my opinion - not to mention that lamb was really their forte whereas Jia Yan does a smattering of what can be loosely described as Dong Bei (东北) and Korean food.