Chinese Take Out on North Shore

One of my favorite Chinese restaurants on the North Shore in Evanston, Joy Yee, is closed for remodeling.

I had a craving, so I tried Wah Mei at 325 Linden Avenue in Wilmette (847-256-7720). It is right by the L tracks near 4th & Linden.

I ate at Wah Mei a few years back and found it underwhelming, although it is the only place up North where you can get excellent pan fried noodles. They will sell the pan fried noodles alone as a side dish, which I find very few restaurants are willing to do. The crispy texture and chewy noodles make an excellent contrast in textures which I tend to enjoy more than rice.

Well, tonight the food was great. The wonton soup had completely changed from last time I had it. It was reminiscent of Seven Treasures (those brain-shaped wontons!). The broth wasn't superlative like Seven Treasures, and the wontons were not quite as good, but all in all it was a well-improved presentation.

I also had chicken fried rice, which while not a connisseur's dish it too was very tasty, with generous chunks of deliciously moist white meat chicken.

My wife had a tofu and vegetable dish which she wasn't wild about, but she's usually not wild about any Chinese food with the exception of the tofu and vegetable soup at Joy Yee. My 12-year old daughter liked her sweet and sour chicken. Others on Chowhound (interestingly there was no reference to this restaurant when I searched on this Forum) have said they liked the eggrolls, beef with black pepper sauce, egg foo young and shrimp with lobster sauce, so there's something to try next time.

While so many of you out there have indicated finding a good Chinese restaurant up North is like finding a needle in a haystack, I would have to say that Wah Mei was very good tonight. Again, not as good as some of our favorites in Chinatown (like LTH!), but if you live up here and get a craving, it will definitely suffice.

All in all, it was a very positive experience.

We had takeout on Christmas day from Chinatown Express in Morton Grove. It was good, though they were packed. Their estimate of when the food would be ready for pickup was off by about 3/4 hour.

Their potstickers weren't anything to write home about, with thick, undercooked dough, but everything else was nice. A thoughtful touch was that they didn't drown the hot and spicy chicken in its sauce, but packed it separately, so it still had a little crispiness when it got to our host's home (I'm not sure which dish it was, battered and fried chicken in a hot/sweet sauce that wasn't the usual neon-pink of "sweet and sour" preparation. It had shreds of carrot in the sauce. We had asked for a spicy chicken dish, and this one fit the bill.)

We had dinner Christmas Day at Szechwan Kingdom in Northbrook, which was also packed. In the past, we've had very good takeout from here (brilliantly packaged) and a memorable off-menu vegetarian banquet meal.

Tuesday's meal included very good "Szechwan wontons," with thin wrappers in a mildly spicy peanut sauce, decent but not stellar egg rolls, and two entrees that we would not have ordered together if we'd realized that they would both be pretty sweet: The orange beef had very good, crisp texture and nice orange flavor but the sauce was tooth-achingly sweet, with just a hint of red pepper and no visible chilies. (My favorite version of this dish comes from a place in Cincinnati, where it's full of dried chilies and hardly sweet at all.) And the sauce with Empress shrimp was also less spicy than I expected, though the battered shrimp were light, crisp and delicious.

So the sweet-toothed will be fine here; hotheads may want to order "extra spicy." Dishes from the neither-sweet-nor-spicy repertoire we've had have been fresh and well-made.

For Christmas dining next year, I note that in the same mall Max & Benny's deli and the Japanese place also appeared to be open.

Over dinner, I pondered: Sure, Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas, but what do Christians whose major celebration is on Christmas Eve eat on Christmas Day? Leftovers? Because if all the Poles, Italians, Germans, Hungarians and other ethnic groups who do their primary celebrating on Dec. 24 were out looking for restaurants to eat in the next day, there'd likely be a heck of a lot more places open.

Szechwan Kingdom
847/562-1368
Brookside Mall
545 Waukegan Road
Northbrook

LAZ wrote: (My favorite version of this dish comes from a place in Cincinnati, where it's full of dried chilies and hardly sweet at all.)

No Way! I grew up less than a mile from there on Victory Parkway - our vet's office was probably a few doors away. Who knew? We ate at the Dragon Inn in Swifton Commons and thought it was sophisticated....at least until Red Lobster opened further up

Mhays wrote:No Way! I grew up less than a mile from there on Victory Parkway - our vet's office was probably a few doors away. Who knew?

Well, this is not the original location, which was in Norwood. They had a fire a few years ago. I used to visit Cincinnati at three or four times a year.

I have recently eaten several times at Schezwan Kingdom in Northbrook and found the food to be consistently as good as anything downtown. What a pleasant surprise!
My recs there would include the dimsum!
The crispy duck is my 11 yr old son's favorite! (go figure...)
and my fave are the shrimp with candied walnuts
yum