Triple Crown LTH Dinner [Moved from Events]

wlingjpera wrote:Sorry to those who didn't like 3xC... I felt bad to have scheduled it there instead of LTH. Hopefully you guys won't hate me for it.

Scott,

I was delighted to try to someplace I have never been before. Some experiences are better than other, though how do you know if you stick to the tried and true?

Anyway, I am glad to be one of the two you sat next to! Until we meet up again...

Best wishes,
Cathy2

Scott, thanks for organizing the dinner. I'll wait until more reports come in to comment on the food, but I very much enjoyed it last night. It will be, however, interesting to hear the various opinions as I think Triple Crown had a range of success with their dishes (and big ranges, from sublime to lousy) So, how many good dishes comprise a good meal. Me, I thought about 2/3rd good to 1/3rd not very good, but I am a glass 1/2 full kinda guy, meaning I liked dinner.

Rob

wlingjpera wrote: Sorry to those who didn't like 3xC... I felt bad to have scheduled it there instead of LTH. Hopefully you guys won't hate me for it.

Scott,

It's as much, if not more about the company than the meal, and the company was grand. Meeting new people, you, SFGirl, her husband and friend, along with the other LTHers, makes for a wonderful evening.

As far as the food, how can you not enjoy a meal that includes Duck Tongue in XO sauce and Deep fried pork chops with spicy salt?


Not to mention delicious Deep fried flounder with ginger and scallion soy. Plus it's always fun to see Cathy2 and CrazyC arm wrestle over the crisp fish fins.


Another excellent dish was Will's pick of shredded duck with preserved vegetables and war mein noodle soup, though I did not get a picture. I did, however, get a picture of the Oyster w/black bean garlic sauce. Good flavor, but quite salty. Actually, that was a theme throughout the meal, over salted, at least to my taste.


Salt and pepper scallops were tasty, though, once again, very salty, as was the Triple Crown fried chicken.


Clams in black bean sauce were good, not life altering, but certainly within the range.


One no-so-good dish was the Chinese ham with jelly fish. The ham was chilled, as in not fully defrosted, and the jelly fish was a bit flavorless.


Dishes not show:

Ong Choi w/garlic, we had ordered snow pea shoot, but it was very good anyway.
Baby rib w/black pepper--Good flavor, but salty
Triple Crown fried chicken--Crisp, good flavor, but over the top salt flavor
Shredded duck w/preserved vegetables and noodle (soup)--Delicious
Seafood combination on crisp rice noodle--Nice crisp noodle, but the seafood was coated in a goopy corn starch sauce.
Roast meat combination, medium size.--Duck was ok, they forgot the roast pork.

Reading back, it sounds as if I did not like the meal, overall, as Rob said, it was an enjoyable meal and the company most excellent.

Please count me and my wife in for Katsu late November. Katsu is one of my favorite restaurants. For those not familiar with Katsu here's a link to a great Post by Mike G.

Enjoy,
Gary

Wjlingpera, it was a very nice evening out - you have nothing to apologize for. Thank you very much for arranging it.

Gary - they didn't forget the roast pork in the BBQ combo - one half of the plate was half a duck, the other half was lozenges of salty crisky skin on roast pork, with a very nice balance of fat-to-meat.

Seth Zurer wrote:Wjlingpera, it was a very nice evening out - you have nothing to apologize for. Thank you very much for arranging it.

Gary - they didn't forget the roast pork in the BBQ combo - one half of the plate was half a duck, the other half was lozenges of salty crisky skin on roast pork, with a very nice balance of fat-to-meat.

Seth,

Darn, that dish must have gone clockwise, instead of counter-clockwise. Sounds delicious.

Wjlingpera/Scott, in case I wasn't clear in my post, yes, thank you very much for setting up the evening. It was, as Seth said, a very nice evening out.

Enjoy,
Gary

As everyone else has said, the dinner was quite enjoyable...more for the company than for the food, but some of the dishes were quite good and others broadened my pallete with new tastes that I had not had before. Wjlingpera, It was great meeting you in person (SF Girl, too). thanks for setting this up!

OK, I have a bit more time now to write about the food...

First let me say those pictures did a very good job of capturing the dinner, and the very first dinner captures about as well as anythng the LTH credo. I mean you have your exotic, duck tongue in XO sauce; you have your fried porky goodness, pork chops so good we had to order them twice; you have your red wine and your bourbon, a very fine Basil Haydon (although as much as I enjoyed it, I would say my preference is for a heavier, sweeter bourbon [ed. you mean Knob Creek?], you have BBQ sauce on the table [!], and of course you had some chile sauce (and I am man enough to admit that Gary's is better).

Now, on to the meal:

As I noted above, there were more than enough good dishes, to make it overall, a good eating night as well as a good company night. Still, some of the dishes were plain bad and some of the dishes would have been fine if they were not like other dishes. As Wiv sez, went just a tad too far with the NaCl.

Take the oysters in black beans. I thought they were big, fresh, well steamed pacific oysters. Triple Crown uses a lot of black bean on the topping, much more than usual. I liked the way it complemented the oysters, and if this dish was there as counter-balance to some other blander dishes, I would have been fine. Yet, we had intense saline flavors in many other dishes, the pork chops, the chicken, the sauce for the fish, the duck (I did not notice it as much in the short ribs). These dishes were almost all fine in their too saltiness if they were the ONLY too salty things. Otherwise it really added up. So, my take on the meal as a whole was, it was flawed.

The other problem with our ordering is that many of the dishes were the wrong size for our group, so that by the time the pork chops made it around the table, there were none left for me. The fish, I think everyone tried, but it was very small tastes, and the fish was especially good.

Not only did we get too much salt, we got too much deep fry. Again, a lot of these dishes were very, very good, but piled on top of each other, well no one was in a hurry to have a donut last night at Huck Finn. The person manning the deep fry wok was not 100% skilled. Look at Gary's picture of fried flounder and you can see the excess grease. Still, a bit of grease did not mar either of the scallops or the fried flounder.

Many moons ago, I asked about whole flounder on Chowhound. Well, here it was The extrea grease did not keep the crust from being crusty, and the crust kept the inside ideal. The sauce of dark soy, jalepenos and oil worked well too.

I am not a huge scallop fan, but these were excellent scallops, not the least fishy. Again, the frying was not artful but it hardly affected the product.

I am still flumoxed over Triple Crown's serving, now twice, of frozen ham hock. Is this some kind of thing I just do not understand? The crabs on the other hand were just plain awful, well, well past prime.

I guess in summary, when you can go to Triple Crown later, with the after-hour menu, you can get twice as much stuff for the same price as we paid. This way, if they work on the same proportion of good to bad, you will get that many more good dishes. I do think it is a good restaurant.

Rob

I got some meat once at the food court in Westmont, whatever that's called, that was chilled to what I called morgue-drawer cold. It doesn't seem to be a mistake, like something that wasn't defrosted properly, but it sure is never going to convince me that it's appetizing.

wlingjpera wrote:Sorry to those who didn't like 3xC... I felt bad to have scheduled it there instead of LTH. Hopefully you guys won't hate me for it.

Triple Crown used to have excellent seafood dishes. With the new remodeled look of the restaurant, was there any change of ownership recently that causes the quality of the cooking to go down??

Any idea?

Triple Crown is one of my regular Chinese take out stops. The management appears to be the same but the carpet is disconcertingly cleaner. The bathrooms are still best used only if absolutely necessary. Despite the mixed review above, Triple Crown has always been good to me. We recently had the salt and pepper scallops (dine in) and they were absolutely great -- very fresh, delicately breaded. As my wife just said over my shoulder -- "you don't get many dishes that you keep thinking about a week later" -- this was one of those dishes. Their snow pea tips are always good as are the beef short ribs with black pepper. We've also had good luck with the soft shell crab, the fish fillet with pan fried noodles, and the beef chow fun.