Cafe Anh Hong
1465 S. State St., Salt Lake City ; 801-486-1912
(see
map)
Dim sum and take-out are daily fare and done well in this bare bones restaurant. Disregard curt service and pay attention to the food.
| Overall |
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| Food |
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| Mood |
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| Service |
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| Kid-friendly |
YES |
| Noise |
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Cuisine: Chinese
Price: $$
Hours: M-Th, 11 am-9:30 pm; F, 11 am-10 pm; S, 10 am-10 pm; Su, 10 am-10 pm
Liquor: None
Corkage: $ 0
Reservations: Not accepted/necessary
Accepts:    
Recommended Dishes: Siu mai dumplings, lobster with ginger and green onions, General Tso’s chicken.
August 11, 2010
Dumplings and lobster give Anh Hong a winning hand
By Vanessa Chang
“Don’t take it personally,” my friend whispered as the server at Café Anh Hong walked away from our table. “He’s always been that way and I’ve been eating here since 1997.”
I was beginning to think the server really disliked me. Our whole table, actually. He seemed impatient when we asked for another few minutes to look over the huge menu. He seemed even more perturbed when I requested a dish he delivered to a table of two elderly Chinese gentlemen eating in the drab dining room.
That’s the way things have always been here at Café Anh Hong. You don’t necessarily come for the service or ambience, but the food is solid, abundant and cheap. Since 1993, this strip mall eatery has served Cantonese cuisine that’s familiar and far-reaching. It stands out for its surprisingly skilled hand at sauces and a merciful deficit of grease.
It doesn’t matter if you’re fluent in English and Cantonese. Our server — who seems to be one of two in the large dining area — was curt, but efficient. Water glasses were filled and tables were timely bussed. And despite his annoyance, he did bring the dish I requested within minutes.
The lobster with ginger and green onions ($14.99) made me forget about the guy. A whole lobster, deftly cleaved into pieces and stir-fried with the aromatic root and alium, crowded the oval platter and still steamed from the stove. Eating it is a messy affair. But you hardly notice while you enjoy the lobster’s translucent coating with its notes of sweet heat. The meat was dense whether it was pulled easily from the tail or coaxed out of a knuckle joint with a chopstick.
The weekend dinner crowd was mostly large groups of families with young children who seemed to entertain themselves with the small fish tank teeming with guppies or by taking laps around all the tables that were covered in platters of decent fried rice ($4.55). The staff doesn’t seem to mind and parents appeared at ease.
If a bowl of the succulent wonton soup ($1.50) spilled, it wouldn’t endanger the beauty of the dining area. Anh Hong exemplifies the cliché “never judge a book by its cover.” Professionally, I would describe it as a straightforward lineup of booths and tables. To friends, I would say it is “ghetto-fabulous.”
The décor is standard when compared to other fantastic Chinese restaurants in larger cities. The “fabulous” part is where the food comes in.
When I’m in take-out mode, General Tso’s chicken ($7.25) is ideal, with exceptionally crispy batter-fried pieces in a spicy-tangy sauce (that’s not overly sweet!).
For a dine-in experience, the chef’s specials in the middle of the menu are what stand out, including a sizzling platter of duck, which was tender and infused with the woodsy, licorice scent of star anise ($8.55).
Hiccups are few: a plate of chow mein ($6.75) diluted with more bean sprouts than a sane person should eat or tough bits of calamari mingling with the tender ones in a salt-baked seafood platter ($8.95).
For these prices, it’s worth it. Order items you see delivered to other tables — even if the food has an unfamiliar name. Look out for those handwritten signs, faded and fresh, advertising things like the lobster and the dim sum marked down from $3 to $2 a selection.
Order the dense siu mai — ground shrimp and pork nested in a wrapper and shaped like tulip blossoms — fluffy steamed barbecue pork buns, and shrimp and chive dumplings peeking through translucent skins. They are available on the menu during weekdays or directly from one of the women who drives around a cart.
Noise levels go up during weekend dim sum when the staff adds to the cacophony with rolling carts piled with steaming bamboo baskets.
But no one was complaining. That’s the way Café Anh Hong has always been.
Tribune's rating system
Overall rating
1 star Good
2 stars Very good
3 stars Excellent
4 stars Extraordinary
Entree price
$ Entree under $10
$$ $10-$18
$$$ $18-$25
$$$$ Above $25
Restaurant Noise
1 bell Quiet (under 65 decibles)
2 bells Can talk easily (65-70)
3 bells Talking somewhat difficult (70-75)
4 bells Raised voices (75-80)
A bomb Too noisy for normal conversation (80+)
The Tribune covers the cost of all meals at reviewed restaurants. Star ratings are based on a minimum of two visits. Ratings are updated continually based on at least one revisit. There is no connection between reviews and advertising.
January 6, 2006
Small plates of dim sum have a big taste
By Lesli J. Neilson
Editor's note: Today Lesli J. Neilson joins Mary Brown Malouf as a restaurant reviewer in an effort to provide Tribune readers with more reviews of Utah's dining scene. Look for her reviews the first Friday of every month.
From San Francisco to New York City, restaurants offering "small plates" -- smaller portions of an item -- are the hip, new places to dine. But the Chinese have been eating this way for centuries. Translated roughly as "touching the heart," dim sum is the ultimate small-plate food. And Café Anh Hong is crafting delicious dim sum and other Cantonese dishes.
The restaurant is sandwiched between a Hawaiian barbecue and a Korean restaurant in the Midtown Plaza strip mall on Salt Lake City's State Street. The décor is bare-bones, save for a few Chinese lanterns and murals, and a fish tank of live lobster and crab, but the two-room place is very clean.
Owner Jian Wu and his wife, Sherly, opened the restaurant in 1993. The clientele is mostly Asian and the menu is in English and Chinese, with daily specials listed near the door (in Chinese) and banquet menus on the wall at each table, portents of good things to come.
Dim sum is customarily eaten for breakfast or lunch and accompanied by tea. A cart full of small, stacked steaming containers is wheeled to your table once you're seated. Point to one and the lid is removed to reveal three or four small dumplings, buns or balls. If the dim sum looks and sounds intriguing, tell your server, and he'll place the container on your table and jot down the dim sum you've selected on the bill left at your table; if you decline, he'll continue to offer other dim sum until you're happy with what you've ordered.
Har gow (shrimp encased in a translucent rice flour wrapper), dipped in a bit of vinegar and soy sauce, was sweet and juicy. Siu mai (ground pork and green onions stuffed inside a wheat flour wrapper), though good-tasting, had been steamed too close together, making it difficult to separate the dumplings without tearing the delicate wrappers. Char siu bao (sweet barbecued pork tucked into steamed fluffy white buns) needed just a bit more of the toothsome filling in the tangerine-sized split bun. But bean curd (tofu skin), folded around ground beef and green onions and drizzled with a light brown sauce, was deliciously salty and savory. For a sweet ending, the sesame ball (glutinous rice flour formed around peanut paste, deep-fried and rolled in toasted sesame seeds) was a textural surprise, but the sesame and peanut flavors worked well together.
A dish of Chinese broccoli ($5.25), drizzled with rich oyster sauce, was a great palate cleanser between dim sum bites.
But the kitchen doesn't just excel at dim sum. The "house special duck sizzling plate" ($7.95) -- squares of tender duck skin and meat, broccoli florets, water chestnuts, snow peas, carrots, onions, celery and straw mushrooms -- didn't have any of the advertised sizzle, but the ingredients worked well together, despite too much sauce. The whole steamed sea bass ($14.95), resting in a slightly vinegary soy sauce and topped with fried julienned ginger and green onions, was the best dish on a recent evening. The tender meat flaked off the bones and paired harmoniously with the ginger and green onions. (The fish cheeks are a delicacy.) An intriguing-sounding dish of long, thin baby abalone strips with black mushrooms, carrots, onions and celery ($7.55) wasn't as successful and seemed one-dimensional except for the slightly chewy abalone.
Many of the best vegetable choices aren't on the menu. Slender Asian eggplant pieces ($8.95), cut on the bias and stuffed with a ground shrimp mixture, were served in a sauce with fermented soybeans, green onions and garlic. The combination of flavors was addictive, but the eggplant was drowning in too much sauce.
Café Anh Hong's Sandy location, 8650 S. 1300 East, couldn't be more different. Other than offering a small sampling of dim sum (made at the State Street location), the menu reads like any other ho-hum Chinese-American place.
Service at both locations is perfunctory but efficient, water glasses are routinely filled and dishes arrive at a good pace. One evening, it was refreshing to hear the owner chatting and laughing with a couple of longtime regulars in Cantonese. Makes me want to learn Cantonese and tell him how happy I am to have found his restaurant. Too bad I can't say that about the Sandy location.
Tribune's rating system
Overall rating
1 star Good
2 stars Very good
3 stars Excellent
4 stars Extraordinary
Entree price
$ Entree under $10
$$ $10-$18
$$$ $18-$25
$$$$ Above $25
Restaurant Noise
1 bell Quiet (under 65 decibles)
2 bells Can talk easily (65-70)
3 bells Talking somewhat difficult (70-75)
4 bells Raised voices (75-80)
A bomb Too noisy for normal conversation (80+)
The Tribune covers the cost of all meals at reviewed restaurants. Star ratings are based on a minimum of two visits. Ratings are updated continually based on at least one revisit. There is no connection between reviews and advertising.
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