seebee wrote:1st meal "out" in over a year, and well...LSC spoke to us.

Which LSC?

Sorry I left that out -
Chinatown branch.

According to a social media post of theirs, their new Grant Park (South Loop) location might be in soft open mode. Looks like they also have private rooms with karaoke for reservation.

Interior looks pretty nice.
https://fb.watch/4Y9XI5F_60/
https://www.facebook.com/14752139327470 ... 395838142/


Lao sze Chuan Grant Park
616 S Wabash

Since we were dropping off a car for service in Buffalo Grove yesterday, I decided to get some good Chinese food at Lao Sze Chuan Skokie.
There is no Szechuan food in Wisconsin.
On the way we stopped at Fresh Farms on Golf for some needed lamb and veal, got the $5 off coupon, thank you Dave and on to Skokie via Golf.
My wife had Moo Shu Chicken and pronounced it good.
I had Spicy beef with Beef Maw, no Beef Maw with Pork Blood available.
Excellent but a small portion, next time a double order fro my son and myself.
Kung Pao Chicken and Spicy Pork with Garlic were outstanding and although the heat was not extreme in the least, I had a layer of sweat on my face at the end of dinner.
A tell tale sign of good heat and food.
No condiments were required to spice up the flavors or heat.
Pick up car today and on to Mitsuwa for some needed supplies we are out of.
Traveling on the Tollway is actually easier during the week than on Saturday due to the Get-Away Traffic, but I noticed a 2 mile long Northbound backup due to some minor construction in the Tollway. We have back via HWY 41 but had to divert at Grand Av due to construction. Thank you WAZE.
-Richard

We had an indescribably terrible lunch at Lao Sze Chuan in HIghland Park last week. Atrocious dry spicy popcorn chicken, with almost no meat, orange chicken so bad the kids and later the dogs refused to eat it. Expensive. Lousy.

Oh, the HP branch is awful. Skokie is consistently good, and thus, despite being much farther from my house than the HP location, gets my business regularly.

Sadly, a recently delivered dinner from LSCHP was pretty darned awful. It was vaguely reminiscent of LSC in its heyday but only enough to clearly remind me that what that was, this was not. The quality of the food was not helped by the fact that the 1-hour ETA was exceeded by a good 30+ minutes (and this, ordering via their official website/app). I have empathy and I understand but probably not enough to place another order in the foreseeable future. It's hard to knowingly enlist for disappointment.

I've been semi-obsessed over these past 18 months with making mapo tofu at home. LSC is the place where I originally experienced -- and fell in love with -- the dish; my personal benchmark. But the bitter mess that showed up at our house was virtually impossible to eat. Funny, if this had been the first time I'd had mapo tofu, I never would have even thought about making it at home.

=R=

ronnie_suburban wrote:Sadly, a recently delivered dinner from LSCHP was pretty darned awful. It was vaguely reminiscent of LSC in its heyday but only enough to clearly remind me that what that was, this was not. The quality of the food was not helped by the fact that the 1-hour ETA was exceeded by a good 30+ minutes (and this, ordering via their official website/app). I have empathy and I understand but probably not enough to place another order in the foreseeable future. It's hard to knowingly enlist for disappointment.

I'm pretty sure they outsource delivery operations to ChowBus, at least they do at the city locations. One time I called to ask where my order was and it had been picked up/sent out almost an hour previous but the ChowBus app had not yet queued me up for delivery for the driver. I was refunded the majority of my meal because it arrived cold.
Yesterday, my food arrived forty minutes after ordering in perfect condition.

lodasi wrote:

ronnie_suburban wrote:Sadly, a recently delivered dinner from LSCHP was pretty darned awful. It was vaguely reminiscent of LSC in its heyday but only enough to clearly remind me that what that was, this was not. The quality of the food was not helped by the fact that the 1-hour ETA was exceeded by a good 30+ minutes (and this, ordering via their official website/app). I have empathy and I understand but probably not enough to place another order in the foreseeable future. It's hard to knowingly enlist for disappointment.

I'm pretty sure they outsource delivery operations to ChowBus, at least they do at the city locations. One time I called to ask where my order was and it had been picked up/sent out almost an hour previous but the ChowBus app had not yet queued me up for delivery for the driver. I was refunded the majority of my meal because it arrived cold.
Yesterday, my food arrived forty minutes after ordering in perfect condition.

That's good to know. Yes, our food was pretty cold but I don't think that was the only factor in the poor quality of our meal. In addition to obvious temperature related issues, flavors were not right in several of the dishes we ordered, mostly notably the aforementioned mapo.

If there ever is a next time, I'll dine in to reduce the number of variables. I really hate being negative about any place right now but the food problems I experienced last night reminded me a lot of the ones I experienced at Skokie before I stopped going there. That happened well before "pandemic" was ever part of our collective lexicon.

=R=

Tony Hu on WGN making Dry Chili Chicken

Before he was incarserated.

Cathy2 wrote:Tony Hu on WGN making Dry Chili Chicken

budrichard wrote:Before he was incarserated.

The clip is from early 2015, so yep.

=R=

budrichard wrote:Before he was incarserated.

After prison was his recipe on the "Prison Rice Bowl".