After visiting Village Kitchen a few times and trying a good number of dishes, I did get the Missus to visit and also revisited with coworkers Calvin and John.
What resulted from the Missus's visit was that we did take-out a couple of times and found that they pack the dishes quite well in decent take out containers! Yay, no Styrofoam!
Not everything at VK has been to my liking, but some of the dishes we had were especially good. So, I thought I'd go with picks, pans, and reruns.
Picks:
On one evening I ordered the Salted Long Bean and Smoked Pork, but when I came home I realized I had something else.
Turns out this is the Sour and Spicy Chicken Gizzards, something that I'd usually not order. Not that I don't care for gizzards, I love them. But there was just something about "sour" and "chicken gizzards" that didn't sound appetizing to me. I was however, wrong, as this has become one of our favorite dishes. The gizzards are sliced thin, with a mild chew, think thinly sliced beef heart. I do love the pickled chilies in this, while not "Hunan spicy" in my book, the pickled peppers give the dish a nice zip. Very nicely flavored.
A wonderful mistake!
Another dish that has become a favorite of our; minus the not so good steamed buns is the Homestyle Baby Radish Leaves. Love the mild chilies and the bitter stir fried radish leaves. The flavors really work well here; bitter-mildly spicy-a touch of sour and just salty enough for our tastes.
The Boiled Green Pork Intestine was nice; the intestine really clean, and the slightly bitter greens added a nice flavor counter-point.
I think this did need a bit more flavor and as nicely as the intestines were prepped, the funky mild-offal flavor was too mild.
Pans:
When I visited with John and Calvin, I ordered the first dish on the menu; Pickled Chili Chicken.
First off, the cutting job on the chicken wasn't that great. It's okay to have bones with the chicken pieces, but make sure that most of them aren't sharp. There was a bit too much bones for my liking. This was also a bit spicy, but otherwise somewhat bland, and needed a bit more soy sauce and something else to make it less one dimensional.
I've figured out that VK doesn't do pork the way I like it. At least based on previous visits and on these two dishes……
The pork belly with preserved vegetable ("Chef's Braised Pork") was not that great, even disregarding the steamed buns we don't care for. The pork was too lean and on the chewy side and the flavoring just wasn't there.
One evening we tried Grandma's Braised Pork. The flavoring was quite good, great soy sauce flavors, the chilies added a nice "green" flavor to the dish. The pork however, was really tough. like it hadn't been braised long enough. These two dishes, along with the other pork dishes we've tried, have made us a bit gun-shy about ordering swine here.
Reruns:
There are of course those dishes we enjoyed from my previous post.
That Eggplant and Century Egg dish is by far our favorite.
VK has become one of the "I'm really too tired to cook tonight so let's do take-out" options for us.
Village Kitchen
4720 Clairemont Mesa Blvd
San Diego, CA 92117