House Gourmet

A new Japanese/Chinese restaurant opened up near us just recently - in the place that used to be El Maguey, decent (but not great!) Mexican food. The place has been vacant for quite awhile. A year or so ago a new Japanese/Thai restaurant opened up were a Thai place closed years ago - not the best stretch for restaurants, what with all the fast turn over! But at least we're getting a sampling of multicultural cuisine nice and close to us!

Since I'm off today to do some clean up and shopping before my folks show up this evening for a weekend visit, I decided to give House Gourmet a try for lunch. I noticed them when I drove by last week, and then a couple days ago we had one of their menus on our front doorstep when I got home from work. I'm sorry, but the signs were telling me I HAD to give it a try! Brett's been a little more skeptical, figuring it wouldn't be a very nice place. We both agreed the menu seemed a little pricey for the Chinese food, they also don't seem to offer pint prices - only one price per item, and it seems comparable to the quart prices at most other Chinese restaurants.

Looking to try something different that would also give me the most bang for my buck, I went for one of their Japanese Box Lunches. Chicken Teriyaki seemed like a nice, safe bet, but at the last minute I panicked (as I usually do when ordering) and swapped for something that seemed to have even more variety - the shrimp and vegetable tempura box lunch.


Wow, you get A LOT with these box lunches! In addition to the tempura, I also got an egg roll, three pieces of sliced California Roll (I looooooooove California Roll and have to thank my brother Sean for introducing me to them a few years back!), a salad of iceburg lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers, fried rice (no veggies mixed in, but that's alright), some pickled ginger (yum!), a blob of wasabi (watch out!), a bowl of miso soup (with seaweed and tofu cubes), a small container of spicey mustard for dipping, and a larger bowl of...um...stinky stuff, kinda fishy, but tasted good when the tempura was dipped in it. Oh, and the orange stuff was my ginger dressing for the salad, NOT a duck sauce (as I originally assumed when I dipped tempura in it). Plus the standard accompaniments including chopsticks, plastic utensils, soy sauce and a fortune cookie.

Quite a lot of food for my $8.50 minus 15% for the grand opening sale, hunh!?

The tempura was GOOD! I was worried about getting that as a carry out item - would it hold up? I'm sure it would've been a BIT crisper if I ate in, but it was still fairly crisp and tastey. I got three loooong strips of very straight shrimp (wondering how they pulled that off!), two pieces of broccoli, a slice of sweet potato, a slice of some purpley potatoey tuber or root vegetable (good!), a piece of red bell pepper, and what I THOUGHT was a massive cap from a mushroom, but was actually a slice of eggplant (either way - yum!). Assuming I hadn't all this dipped and fried it would've been very healthy! ;-) Plus both the dipping sauce and the miso soup were INCREDIBLY salty...altho the tempura benefitted from the saltiness of the dip!

For such a bland salad, it was really good with the ginger dressing, and the cold crispness contrasted well with all the other items, and countered their saltiness nicely.

The fried rice was good - nothing exciting, but good.

The spring roll left a little something to be desired - maybe a tad doughy on the inside? And the filling could've used some more flavor/texture.

The California Rolls - mmmmm! Can NOT go wrong with those! YUM YUM YUM! Dipped in a little soy sauce, with a sliver of pickled ginger and maybe a dab of wasabi and I'm in heaven!

The miso soup. Ok, I THOUGHT I'd really like this. You see it listed in all Japanese menus. It's a staple! I did NOT like it. I ate a fair amount - not wanting it to go to waste, and wanting to give it a fair shot (some things grow on you and then become addicting the more you taste them and get past the initial "ew, kinda gross" factor - like Twiglets!). But I did not like the miso soup. I couldn't even get the cats to try it - I actually went so far as to put the bowl down on the floor to convince 'em it was something good and tastey meant for them, like tuna or a little yogurt (which they've discovered they LOVE!). But this stuff - they stepped towards it, stopped quickly as they sniffed, winced their eyes a few times, and backed away.

So no more miso for us! I would ask for a substitute soup if that's an option.

I grabbed some extra full color glossy menus to take in to work next week - I know I've got some coworkers that have come out this way in the past to eat out, so hopefully they'll give House Gourmet a try and report back. Sharon's due for a couple visits over the next couple months, so maybe we'll go for a sushi/roll run! YUM! I might even get Brett to go eat with me there so we can get some Chinese food - he usually sticks with chicken & broccoli...so he can report back on that.

And this wraps up the most extensive restaurant/one meal review I've ever written! I see alot of other people out there do similar things, either for food they've prepared, or when they eat out. I'm sure my friends who see this will just say "wow, anal retentive!" LOL