Tonight, I hit up Broadway Bistro with my family. It's a medium sized Chinese cafe located near some pretty big name Chinese restaurants in Milbrae such as Hong Kong Flower Lounge, and Fook Yeun. This is a place also of custom because there is a fixed set of dishes we usually order. The service isn’t the greatest. The service is really slow because I don’t think they have enough waiters to meet the demand of customers. The atmosphere is clean, like some of the better Chinese café’s you’ll go to.
The above is the Beef Brisket with Rice Noodle or "Ho Fun". There are two types of Brisket Noodles. The more popular one is the one with the brown-spiced soup, and the other is the clear soup, "Ching Tong". Each, from what I've noticed, uses a different type of brisket even though they're both named beef brisket. Either that or their preparation allows for the completely different texture. The brisket with the clear soup is usually softer and breaks apart in your mouth when you first eat it as compared to the one that comes with the brown soup that is usually a little harder but still brakes apart easily. I will always order the clear broth over the brown broth if they serve it, and this place does serve it. This is usually one of my favorite dishes here because their clear broth brisket is really tender. However, today, it was either over prepared, underprepared, or the meat was just plain "old". The brisket was really tough and chewy to the point it was inedible. Bad job this time around. This, however, isn't the norm as usually it is really good. The broth was about the same as before, their noodles are also really good, but the key portion of the dish simply failed. Just a note on the image. It might look kinda gross because of the yellow fatty colored yellow substance. It's not fat, it's actually beef tendon.
In addition, we ordered the Hong Kong Styled Beef Chow Fun. Even with Chow Fun, there are two types. One is prepared “dry” and the other “wet”. This place makes a really good “dry”. Usually we never order the dry simply because it’s oilier than the wet to prevent the noodles from sticking together while it is prepared. However, one day a while back, we ate here. A few tables over, someone ordered this dish. As the waiter walked passed our table, the aroma of the soy sauce absorbed in the noodles, and the overall dish was so good I had to order it. That was how we found out they made a really good “dry” Chow Fun. Today’s was prepared just like before, a really strong scent accompanied by a really strong flavor. The noodles also weren’t drenched in oil. This is usually a good indication that the restaurant has really good “wok hei” (for those of you who are Chinese speakers, you should understand what this means, but in essence it means their stove is really powerful. Yes, that sounds weird, but that’s pretty much what it means).
Last to arrive was the Baked Garlic Lamb dinner, which is served with a dinner roll and a soup. Their lamb is pretty decent. It doesn’t have much of that game meat stench you get from a lot of other lamb dishes. That could however be clouded by the intense amount of garlic sauce they put on top of each of the lambs. I brushed off some of the garlic just to test, and the stench was only minutely present. The texture of the meat was like that of a fillet mignon: really soft and tender. Perhaps the worst part of the dish was the garlic. Don’t’ get me wrong, I love garlic, but this was just overwhelming.
Overall a good restaurant, but very disappointing as the dish I was looking most forward to, the beef brisket, wasn’t prepared up to par. I would still recommend the place, and I would still order the same three dishes if I go again. I’ve been here enough not to let this one blunder be representative of all the times I’ve been to the restaurant.
Yelp
349 Broadway
Millbrae, CA 94030
(650) 692-3378
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