Day 10: Yummy, Yummy Not So Yummy

Last week I mentioned that we had two Chineese restaurants in a row, and we have arrived at Yummy Yummy at 794 E 14th St. In my last post I mentioned how I've eaten here before, via delivery, and it was ok.

I assumed that the food would taste much better if I ate it directly from the wok to my plate, instead of after it had sat in the delivery guy's car for a few extra minutes. Well, not so much. The food was kinda gross.  

It's very hard for me to write a negative review of any place, just because I know how hard it is to run a restaurant on a day-to-day basis. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, that this was an off day for them. Maybe their best cook was off that day; maybe we ordered the wrong things that just weren't that good to begin with.

I'll start with what is good about this place. As far as I can tell, this is the first restuarant on our quest that has a website! Granted it's not going to win any Webby's, but hey, they have a menu online, a map, and hours.

Also they seem to go out and drop delivery menus in my neighborhood about once a month to drum up business. All very good ideas that other places could emulate to get more business.  

First item up was the House Special Chow Mein.* The asterix was to tell me that it had prawns, beef and chicken. It might have also meant don't order this. What was weird was that for how many different animals there were in these soggy noodles, they all tasted the same. Not a good start.

The second thing we ordered was supposed to be our healthy entrée with tofu and mushrooms. It had the same brown sauce that the noodles had, and the mushrooms appeared to come from a can. They reminded me of this one day, on a trip to Egypt, where we got rice pudding from a small store, El Malkey, and each cup had a scratch and win thing on the side.

We all won some tschotske crap thing, except for Laurie, whose scratcher wouldn't scratch off. So our friend went in to talk to the shop owners about this defective scratcher. He came out from the store a few minutes later with a five-pound El Malkey brand can of mushrooms. Now you may ask why a rice pudding store needs canned mushrooms, but if you have to ask, you've obviously never been to Egypt.

The lemon chicken was also covered in some brown sauce that tasted a little like lemon, but not much. It was crispy, and there was a lot of it, that's about all it had going for itself. At least there was plenty of rice to soak up the sauce...oh wait, we never got any rice.  

Maybe one has to ask for that, but seems to come standard at any other Chinese restaurant. I would have asked our waitress, but after our entrées were dropped off, we didn't see her until the check came with boxes for our leftovers, which we never ate.

Yummy Yummy didn't live up to its name, and I'll probably go to Little Namking for my fix instead.  

 —-

Distance traveled:

Yummy Yummy:  1.6 miles roundtrip

Total travelled so far: 14.5 miles

Originally posted at: broadmoortobayfair.tumblr.com