I was on my own for dinner tonight, and had recently noted a random blurb in Citybeat about Lemon Grass in Hyde Park having the best crab rangoons in town. Now, I love me a good crab rangoon, even when the item has not even been shown a picture of a crab, much less contain any crabmeat, so I decided this was as good a time as any to check it out.
First impression was when I read the menu was LORDIE......5.95 for crab rangoon? I was wanting an appetizer, not an entree :-) Turns out everything is about 25-50% higher than you'd expect at a typical asian restaurant. Fried rice and vegetarian dishes ran around 8 dollars, and most entrees were 9 dollars or more. I dug deep and asked for 1 order of the rangoons (6 pieces) and 1 order of the chicken (veggie also available) spring rolls (2 pieces - 3.25).
While waiting, I stopped over at the 24-hour Busken Bakery across the street, looking over the schneckens from Virginia Bakery, and something called a Maysville Cake - looks a lot like your basic square chocolate cake with chocolate icing. Anyone heard of this?
Back at Lemon Grass, my order had come out from the kitchen just as I arrived. This type of food (for me) is at it's best right out of the fryer, so I left quickly and started sampling on the hood of my parked car.
The rangoons were very good, perhaps not the best I have ever had, but still. The shells were the thinnest I had ever seen, very crisp, with a very smooth surface, one might almost call them wispy. Biting into them produced a very satisfying crunch, and the flakes/crumbs that dropped away strongly resembled broken bits of glass from a very small lightbulb. One big suprise - I could actually taste the crab. Or Krab. My palate isn't sophisticated enough to tell the difference :-)
The spring rolls were made with the same smooth, ultrathin wrappers, and were solidly decent but also quite small.
Overall - pretty good, albeit not as good as advertised, but expensive, particularly for the sheer mass (or lack thereof) of food you get for the price paid.
Anyone else got an opinion on the place?