East Wall: More than just another Chinese restaurant

By Michelle Jin     10/30/08 7:00pm

East Wall is a small but busy restaurant tucked away in the Dunhuang Plaza of Chinatown. It is open from 11 a.m. to midnight every day, serving authentic Chinese food for lunch, dinner and late-night meals.The restaurant's primary focus is on meat and seafood dishes, but it also offers a variety of vegetarian platters, stews and desserts. In the beverage department, the restaurant offers soft drinks and juices as well as coffee, hot tea and milk tea.

East Wall has plenty to offer for the seafood lover. Fish is served in almost every possible way - pan fried, braised, stir fried, steamed and more. The seafood dishes range from more common ones, like jumbo lobster salad and fried shrimp balls, to more exotic ones, like sliced octopus and rainbow jellyfish. For those who don't mind spending a little more, the restaurant also offers shark fin soup. Although the soup is priced at $48 per person, it is considered a Chinese delicacy. A few of the seafood dishes are seasonal, but most are offered at all times.

For the diner who enjoys seafood but doesn't want to spend too much on it, the walnut shrimp with mayonnaise sauce is much more affordable, extremely tasty and can be shared with everyone at the table. The sweet and creamy platter, one of the signature dishes of the restaurant, contains breaded shrimp covered in a sweet mayonnaise sauce and sprinkled with sugared walnuts.

---

---

The meat served includes chicken, beef, pork and duck. Almost all the meats are salty, and many are made with vegetables. Beef ribs with black pepper, crispy chicken with golden garlic and Peking duck (crispy duck skin and meat slices with bread) are just a sampling of those meat choices. The roasted pork with salted vegetables has a nice blend of sliced meat with leafy greens, but the pork itself is too salty. After one bite, it is nice to know that the restaurant provides enough white rice for the whole table.

For those who want even more rice than East Wall serves as a complement to the dishes, the restaurant has a list of noodle and other rice plates, including typical takeout foods like fried rice and chow mein. But instead of ordering something that can be found in Chinese fast food restaurants, diners will have a more memorable experience if they make a different choice.

The fried flat rice noodles with beef are particularly delicious. These noodles are not the ordinary long, thin strands, but wide, rectangular ones. They are cooked with a tasty blend of beef slices, green vegetables and mushrooms. This dish, however, is one of the more oily ones on the menu. Those who crave something lighter should consider the seafood tofu hot pot. This flavorful hot pot soup of scallops, tofu and lettuce is also a good choice for soup lovers.

Most of the dishes on the menu include meat or seafood of some kind, but East Wall has a few vegetarian specialties on the list. The vegetables section includes dishes like mixed fresh mushrooms, mixed vegetables delight and chef's special tofu. Unfortunately, only a couple of dishes on the menu contain no meat whatsoever.

Desserts include crispy buns, which are fried buns served with a creamy dipping sauce, and deep fried shrimp balls with coconut topping. Though there is not much to choose from on the dessert menu, East Wall serves each person a free bowl of sweet red bean soup after the meal.

Dishes are priced at around $10 each, a reasonably good deal for some tasty Chinese food. The drive from Rice is a hefty 20 minutes, but for students who want authentic culture and food, venturing to Chinatown is worth the time it takes to get there.

---