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Min Wah Chinese


Melinda

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From RevImmigrant:

I strongly disagree about Min Wah. The only thing good there is the appetizer plate. When I want Chinese, I cook at home. Mama Linda's homestyle Chinese is always good. I tend to like the hot and spicy dishes like chili chicken or pork, Sichuan boiled beef or fish, etc. I just got Fushia Dunlop's two new books, one on Sichuan cooking and the other on Hunan cooking, and I've ordered a book on dim sum, but haven't gotten it yet. Also the guide on about.com/Chinese food has some excellent recipes. Toyo, the Asian market in Guadalajara, has most of the things I use.

The China Inn in Jocotopec has the best Chinese in the area in my opinion, albeit Japanese-influenced. The lady who runs it is Japanese and I think her husband is Mexican. It's very clean too, including the restroom. You can tell a lot about a restaurant if the restroom is clean; then the kitchen probably is too.

There's another Asian grocery store that the lady at the China Inn told us about,but I haven't been there yet. It's on Avenida LaPaz in Guadalajara.

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Guest RevImmigrant

Perhaps Melinda could describe her experience with Chinese food other places. I have eaten Chinese food everywhere I've been almost and certainly everywhere I've lived. I found 3 excellent Chinese restaurants in Berlin, which I enjoyed. To the best of my knowledge there are no good Chinese restaurants in Guadalajara either. I spent 3 days in Singapore in March and 8 days in China in April and, of course, ate Chinese food. I cook a lot and one of my favorites is Chinese. I have 2 woks, a big Chinese steamer for jiozi and char su bao and a hot pot, as well as Chinese dishes on which to serve the food. I also have a cart that has nothing on it but Chinese and some Japanese sauces in jars.

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I agree that Min Wah is not THE best Chinese restaurant we've ever been to...but it's probably the best here in Ajijic. We recently spent several weeks in China...stayed at top-notch hotels... and had fantastic Chinese cuisine while touring that part of the world. Ditto with the restaurants from my home town in Toronto where there is a huge Chinese population. More Chinese restaurants...of all types... than one could ever go to in a lifetime. It's just that here at Lakeside, I consider 95% of the restaurants about 3-star. Very few would equal any of our Toronto restaurants. So, if I have a yen for Chinese food (and I don't want to prepare it myself), I just hop over to Min Wah and get it out of my system. I probably only average a couple of visits to Min Wah every 6 months.

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Guest RevImmigrant

Melinda,I have several Canadian friends who also say the Chinese food and restaurants in general in Toronto are excellent. And I agree that many, if not most, of the restaurants don't meet the standards of excellence of places where I've lived before, the most recent being eastern Germany on the German-Polish border (we had an excellent Chinese restaurant there) and Berlin has some really good ones.

Your comment about Min Wah being the best in Ajijic sums it up. If Min Wah is the best, then the rest are just slightly better than what Klein Max the German farm tiger could cook if he could hold the Chinese shovel in one paw and the wok handle in the other. I don't ever get that hungry for Chinese food. I can always make some fried noodles quickly, not exactly Chinese gourmet, but better than Min Wah. I make jiaozi and char su bao and freeze them so I always have them on hand to defrost and heat quickly.

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I think the China Inn in Joco still ranks as the best locally. By the end of the meal, though, everything tastes the same... but is that not the nature of Chinese junk food?

A surprising turn of events: the Sushi Factory in Guadalajara, which has typical Mexican-style sushi (much of it even cooked!), has several dishes that are not sushi at all, but I would equate with very tasty, very nicely-cooked Chinese dishes, such as ginger chicken. They also have the best rice I've eaten anywhere in Mexico. I've had two dishes there and they were absolutely perfect. The soup, however, was nothing like the menu photos and was boring.

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Min Wah is unclean. On our last attempted visit there were no other diners; two unkempt servers and soiled table cloths on the majority of tables. When we failed to find a clean table we informed the staff that we could not possible consider eating in such a visibly unclean restaurant. It had been a long time since we had even been to this restaurant as their food was always mediocre at best. We simply had a craving that evening for at least something resembling Chinese food. We didn't find it! If there were more people locally who would openly complain about uncleanliness, over time, food preparation and service standards just might have a chance of improving. It's been said before: "It's not the food on the plate that makes people sick...it's the thumb!"

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Guest RevImmigrant

Hey RV, I don't do big groups. Or are you being sarcastic? I don't claim that I cook the bests Chinese food in the world, but what I cook is better than Min Wah. I was just questioning how much experience with really good Chinese food someone who goes to Min Wah has had. In fairness to Min Wah their food was somewhat better 6-8 years ago, but it deteriorated.

My table only seats 8-10 with the extra leaves in it and my dishes are service for 8. I have my close friends over usually once a month for lunch, but, of course, don't always serve Chinese or other Asian. The theme varies each month. Another limitation is my health - I've been retired on disability for over 24 years now and I can only do so much. I always have to plan a menu that has at least one dish I can make ahead. Then there's the clean-up. Thank goodness for dishwashers! I couldn't do it without a dishwasher. My mother had a dishwasher too - the old-fashioned 2 handed German variety aka my father (lol).

Carnivore, the China Inn in Joco is very clean. About restaurant cleanliness: when I was growing up, we used to visit some friends in Waco, TX. Anna, the wife, had gone to high school with my mother. Bob, the husband, was a coffee salesman with a commercial route (he sold only to the restaurants). Bob said if you could see the kitchens in some of the restaurants he sold coffee to, you wouldn't want to eat there and then he mentioned what I always thought were some very nice restaurants.

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Well then, maybe you could handle a bigger group if you cooked Turkish style. Everything done ahead, even a day or two, then something quick on the grill at the last moment. Memories of Izmir! It was all good!

We still go, occasionally, to Min Wah, but for breakfast or some hot & sour soup.

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A Chinese friend of mine in Guadalajara who has tried Min Wah and various other pseudo-chinese restos in Guad predictibly has had no good dish there. His opinion is that these people who have not grown up with the flavours or haven't been exposed to them for many years by having access to properly prepared Chinese food get "rusty" and need an overseer for a few weeks to fine tune their tastes again. Hope my paraphrasing of him makes sense. Most of these places like PJChangs and Min Wah are run by Mexicans who may have cooked in the US which is already steps removed from the real thing, as so often there's a tendency to bow to local tastes (like here).

A propos of a Chinese banquet for those interested, maybe it's not such a bad idea - a team effort by those of us who cook at least some Chinese dishes well and have had exposure via good and authentic Chinese restaurants elsewhere - not free of course as ingredients cost money, but it might satisfy the cravings of the obviously starved-for-Chinese expats! I can think of three of us who could cook, and I'm sure there are a few more. The basic tenet of Chinese food is that it has to be fresh (in many cases, walking just before hitting the plate) so do-ahead likely won't work.

Oh, and if you haven't seen it, try to watch a delightful Chinese movie called Eat Drink Man Woman, about a chef with problems, but you also get to see some lesser known techniques. Hollywood did a remake, using a Mexican family, but it was not very good. There's also Jiro Dreams of Sushi though as you can tell, it's about a Japanese chef, not Chinese and it's more of a documentary, but also marvellous.

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The basic tenet of Chinese food is that it has to be fresh (in many cases, walking just before hitting the plate) so do-ahead likely won't work.
Yeah, but the great thing is all the chopping can be done ahead, and that's most of the work in Chinese cooking. In fact, I'm making ginger chicken tonight, so this aft I will chop the four colours of bell peppers, the celery, jicama, shrooms, etc., and I will soak the cubed chicken in a bag of various sauces and ginger for at least 3 or 4 hours.

The rest is just a big wok show, and that's the part I really like. Wok this way!

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CANAMEX: P.F. Changs is a franchised restaurant that originated in the U.S. and the recipes and standards in the GDL location are identical to what you would find in Houston or elsewhere. In Mexico the P.F. Changs chain is owned entirely by "Alsea" who also own the franchise rights for Burger King, Starbucks, Italianni's, California Pizza Kitchen and Dominoes and................... most of the food service companies who supply the product base for those restaurants. They also control most of the same companies in Argentina. It would be a mistake to think that Min Wah in our little town should be mentioned in any form of comparison.

China Inn in Jocotepec is as good as we've got locally and it's very sad that Min Wah has slipped to it's current level of inexpertise. Years ago they were not too bad but now the restaurant, unfortunately, shows all of the signs of zero supervision by the owners. Perhaps they no longer care and perhaps the clientele they do have don't care either!

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Went there once a while back. Ordered lunch from the numbers menu. It was obviously warmed over leftovers, and not even hot.

I've given up on Chinese food hereabouts. I've heard you can get better tasting in Joco, but that you get MSG belly afterwards. Just second hand report there.

How about abducting a family from Hong Kong and then paying them handsomely to give us those tastes we crave from places like, say, San Francisco?? Oh heck, why not just eat at a good Thai place and think Chinese. We have some good ones of that flavor here. Ricki's, for instance?

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Guest RevImmigrant

All good ideas! There is a Chinese restaurant next to the Chinese artisan shop near Plaza del Sol in Guadalajara that has, to my knowledge, never opened. It was built by someone from Hong Kong, who, reportedly drove around in a Rolls Royce with a Hong Kong plate, but the man died so the restaurant has never opened. If only someone could open that with a decent chef imported from Chengdu, Hong Kong, etc.

Canamex, you can do the chopping ahead as Helper Guy said. The dumplings and buns are fine made ahead, also ribs and roast pork. You can boil the noodles and put them in the refrigerator, then fry them another day. Stir-fry dishes are another matter; they are not good made ahead, although I have been known to eat them leftover since I don't like to throw food away. I don't serve leftovers to other people anyway.

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All good ideas! There is a Chinese restaurant next to the Chinese artisan shop near Plaza del Sol in Guadalajara that has, to my knowledge, never opened. It was built by someone from Hong Kong, who, reportedly drove around in a Rolls Royce with a Hong Kong plate, but the man died so the restaurant has never opened. If only someone could open that with a decent chef imported from Chengdu, Hong Kong, etc.

Canamex, you can do the chopping ahead as Helper Guy said. The dumplings and buns are fine made ahead, also ribs and roast pork. You can boil the noodles and put them in the refrigerator, then fry them another day. Stir-fry dishes are another matter; they are not good made ahead, although I have been known to eat them leftover since I don't like to throw food away. I don't serve leftovers to other people anyway.

The restaurant near Plaza Del Sol was located on Avenida Tizoc just behind the Telmex office/store on Lopez Mateos. The restaurant had serious delays in opening and I believe that it was late 2008 or 2009 before it finally opened. It was suggested that over 2 million dollars was spent on the building, furnishings and equipment. The construction and restaurant installation crew were all brought from China and before the restaurant was completed their work permits for Mexico expired and they were forced to leave the country. The restaurant did finally open about a year later than first planned. Our one and only visit was one of our worst restaurant experiences ever. We were the only diners at about 2:00p.m. on a Friday. The restaurant was truly beautiful, in fact more like a museum than a restaurant. The waiter we had was an overbearing pretentious Mexican who began telling us what we were going to order. When we finally slowed him down and actually had time to look at the very extensive menu it became quite apparent that the restaurant planners has made a serious mistake in that the pricing was so ridiculously high that the restaurant might have been better located in Beverly Hills. As we were there we did order our lunch and everything we ordered was a total disappointment. We never returned but as we're often in the area we noticed that the restaurant quickly closed and the last time we paid any real attention when driving by it appeared that the building was being used to either store or sell Chinese pottery. Someone lost a great deal of money!

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About PF Changs, to put it briefly, it's not Chinese. Maybe it's American Chinese, but it's not Chinese. My simplest, most basic complaint of the long list of things they do wrong is that awful floor-resin white vinegar they pass off with the Japanese soy sauce, at least in Guad, and you're telling me it's the same everywhere. Yuck.

Mexicans don't seem to like real Asian food. At the Korean stands in the mercado de Abastos, the men cooking (Mexicans) told me they only cook real Korean food when the owners are having a "do" and they prepare it as it should be. And they themselves said, apart from my own observations, that Mexicans don't like the real thing.

And yes, I know you can and usually have to do some of the prep ahead.

And I agree with my Chinese friend that many of these cooks could improve their flavours if they have a native helping them, supervising them to refine and hone their tastes at least periodically. Otherwise how can they be expected to know how things should taste? Do they want to bother, do they care? That's a different question. But it's clear to those of us who are aficionados that there is a big void that we want filled.

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The huge majority of "Chinese" food in Mexico is so far removed from its origins--those origins being from the province of Canton, most likely before the turn of the 20th century--that any honest Chinese recipes are lost to the dim, dead past.

However, I invite you to read this: http://mexicocooks.typepad.com/mexico_cooks/2012/11/taiwan-cuisine-in-mexico-city-restaurante-rico-food-in-colonia-del-valle.html

and this: http://mexicocooks.typepad.com/mexico_cooks/2012/03/a-brief-history-of-comida-china-chinese-food-in-mexico-and-restaurante-dalian.html

and then come visit me in Mexico City and we'll go eat the real deal. The Taiwanese owner of the first restaurant has been in Mexico for just a few years; the owner of Dalian has been here just a little longer. Both know and respect what the ingredients and flavors of their dishes should be. The restaurants are always jam-packed with Asians and Mexicans--and us, with our friends. Fabulous food and we are lucky to have found it here.

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Guest RevImmigrant

Thank you, crjd, I didn't realize the restaurant had ever opened. since I wasn't here then. It was so expensive to build and decorate apparently that they thought they had to charge high prices to recoup the costs faster.

Canamex, you're right about Mexicans not liking Asian food much, but look at all of the Argentine steak houses and restaurants with grilled meat and you can see what they like,

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Kinna at Simply Thai has some Chinese entrees on her new menu -- do give the restaurante a try -- she is making her way in this community and deserves our support. She is a good chef and Simply Thai is always immaculate with very good service as she has had time to train her staff.

The setting is beautiful and relaxing which is a huge plus.

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Canamex, you're right about Mexicans not liking Asian food much, but look at all of the Argentine steak houses and restaurants with grilled meat and you can see what they like,

RevImmigrant, I rarely disagree with you--but this is one of those times when I do. Mexico is chock-a-block with Chinese buffet restaurants and those restaurants are always packed to the max during the hours of comida--packed with Mexicans. Every Mexican I know loves what he or she thinks of as Chinese food. There are six Chinese buffets within two blocks of my house. There are Chinese restaurants all over downtown Mexico City, all over Guadalajara, and there are literally thousands of Chinese restaurants along the border of Mexico and the USA.

Mexico is fairly unfamiliar with Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, or other Asian restaurants. But I have seen many a Mexican who once ate a Vietnamese or Thai dinner get dreamy-eyed with nostalgia for the flavors.

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