January 08, 2006|By ELIZABETH LARGE | ELIZABETH LARGE,SUN RESTAURANT CRITIC
If you've eaten at one of Jesse Wong's two restaurants in Columbia, you know to expect the unexpected. So it's no surprise that his newest venture, Jesse Wong's Kitchen in Hunt Valley, isn't anything like the other two, and it's not at all a typical shopping center Asian eatery. For one thing, there's live piano music with dinner.
A large open kitchen dominates the multilevel space. The kitchen is a stage, with the cooking of your meal the performance. The dining area that looks down on it is contemporary but not minimalist. Even though the restaurant is highly designed, it's comfortable, with muted colors and lots of fabric.
Jesse Wong is originally from Malaysia, and the menu reflects the country's cultural diversity. Just about every Asian cuisine is represented, plus plenty of sushi, of course. The prices startled me until I realized that they include an appetizer, salad, entree and dessert. This is a lot of food, and you may want to choose from the smaller list of "Alternative Selections," a la carte appetizers and main courses. We ended up getting three full dinners and one extra entree, a surprisingly spicy version of pad Thai with shrimp, beef and chicken.
Salads appear almost instantly if you have one of the prix fixes. You get your choice of three. Salad isn't something I normally order in an Asian restaurant, but Jesse Wong's does a refreshing seaweed salad, very textural, chilled and scented with sesame. The other two are a Vietnamese garden salad with rice noodles and the J. W. Kitchen salad with a too-sweet dressing. Both, unfortunately, contained limp strips of pineapple.
Among the appetizers, the steamed vegetable dumplings were plump and soft, attractively served in a bamboo steamer. A dice of spicy-sweet chicken and vegetables came with crisp leaves of iceberg, which served as a wrap. The dish is nice and light if you're working your way through four courses.
We were least impressed by the beef satay. The skewers of meat were fine, but the peanut sauce was oilier than usual. (By the way, you can pay extra -- and I mean a lot extra -- and get tempura shrimp, crisp lobster wontons or a crab cake as an appetizer).
In a reverse of the usual order of things, Jesse Wong's entrees were across the board better than the first courses. Enormous sea scallops, seared just long enough, were enhanced by their chilled mango salsa. Fat fillets of grouper, roasted with plum tomatoes, had a delicate basil-scented sauce with distinct Thai flavors. Best of all was the Peking duck for one. You wrap the juicy meat, crackly-crisp duck skin with all the fat rendered away, and strips of cucumber (instead of scallions) in pancakes spread with orange plum sauce -- which tasted pretty much like hoisin sauce to me.
If you've eaten at other Jesse Wong's, you know that he knows Americans prefer Western desserts. You won't get fortune cookies or green tea ice cream here. Dinner comes with a choice of three desserts, all of them worthy of consideration. The molten-centered chocolate cake, poetically called "Warm Soft Chocolate" is served, as it should be, with vanilla ice cream. There's a banana cake with strawberries that I liked a lot. But this meal is best finished with the velvet-textured coconut flan in caramel sauce. It just suits the food.
If anyone in your party doesn't want Asian food, there's a rib-eye steak with a green vegetable and potato croquette or shrimp scampi. But really, with dishes like Hawaiian-style cowboy steak and vanilla shrimp with fresh fruit cocktail on the menu, why not live a little?
elizabeth.large@baltsun.com
JESSE WONG'S KITCHEN
Address: 118 Shawan Road, Hunt Valley
Hours: Open for lunch and dinner daily
Prices: Four course dinners: $25-$45
Call: 410-329-1088
FOOD *** (3 STARS)
SERVICE *** (3 STARS)
ATMOSPHERE *** (3 STARS)
RATINGS: Outstanding: ****; Good: ***; Fair or uneven: **; Poor: *
