Silver Seafood is Back

based on JeffB's recent revelation that the quality problems at Silver Seafood has been remedied by their kitchen, I decided to give it a try last Friday night.

I was having dinner with a friend who honors the tradition of not eating meat on Fridays during Lent. Having ticked away jeff's very positive recent comments about Silver and its excellent live lobster deal, we struck out for Broadway after work.

We opened our meal by sharing a wonderful appetizer of salt and spicy squid (this restaurant's version of salt and pepper). The squid was perfectly cooked, crispy on the outside and tender on the inside.

My friend chose the lobster with garlic and ginger, which oddly enough, is on the American menu rather than the chinese menu. For $23, he got a nice steamed 1 1/2 lb lobster that was then wok stir fried with a thin giner and garlic sauce. The lobster came fresh from the live lobster tank before heading to its tasty demise.

The shellfish itself was excellent. Perfectly cooked. Not rubbery at all. In all honesty, I could have done without the sauce as i am a bit of a lobster purist.

I, being a Presbyterian and only so when it is advantageous to me, ordered a nice order of spare ribs in pepper sauce. The ribs were thinly cut chinese style. The pepper sauce was a glace like concoction thinly glazed on the ribs with distinguishable bits of black pepper interspersed throughout. A solid though not mindblowing dish.

Service was a bit uneven due largely to communication problems. But acceptable nonetheless.

SS seems to be back on it's feet again. Hopefully, it will be able to overcome the dreadful reputation it developed a year or so ago.

Just returned from Silver Seafood. The salt and pepper lobster is quite tasty, and not at all overcooked.

The steamed oysters (huge) in black bean sauce was the same as it was two years ago. Almost tasty, just a hair overcooked, and covered with a too gloppy sauce.

Black sea bass, steamed, with ginger and scallion was the winner of the evening. Succulent, barely cooked fish in an aramatic soy broth. An order of pea shoots rounded out the meal.

There were orders of salt and pepper squid, shrimp, and smelts flying everywhere with the mostly Asian crowd.

I'm glad we gave them another try.

Evil Ronnie wrote:The steamed oysters (huge) in black bean sauce was the same as it was two years ago. Almost tasty, just a hair overcooked, and covered with a too gloppy sauce.

Black sea bass, steamed, with ginger and scallion was the winner of the evening. Succulent, barely cooked fish in an aramatic soy broth.

wife and I split these two items a few weeks ago. we really liked them, had not been to SS in quite awhile.

LTH,

Ellen and I had the pleasure of MAG, TPA and Thor's company at Silver Seafood a couple of weeks ago and, while SS is noticeably better than it was 6-months ago, they are still somewhat uneven.

For example, Salt and Pepper lobster was terrific


while a similar preparation with squid was slightly overcooked resulting in overly chewy squid.


A wall menu special of Shrimp rolls with Chinese ham and scallion was delicious. A subtle hint of peanut butter, or possibly sesame paste, rounded out the flavor.


Black Pepper beef was so-so, with a slightly gummy sauce and overly marinated/slightly mealy beef.


Clams w/black bean sauce was good, not great


while the order of plain pan fried rice noodle was perfection to (almost) rival 'Little' Three Happiness.


Stir fried watercress had good flavor, but was a bit on the stemy side


While Thor's simple steamed green beans were right on the mark.


MaPa Tofu was ok, a little gummy from corn starch and no real depth of flavor. Spring World does this dish really well.


TPA, a widely recognized expert on all things egg roll, thought SS's version quite good, with a hint of peanut butter.


Only small problem of the night was Thor drank most of the champagne and got a bit rowdy.


Silver Seafood is comfortable and accommodating, service quite good and prices are reasonable, though they did charge $5 corkage per bottle. I will most certainly be back, and soon, I'd give Silver Seafood a 75% of it's former self rating, which is still pretty darn good.

Enjoy,
Gary

Silver Seafood is one of those restaurants you try every 2-3 years over a stretch of time because, for some reason or another, you really want to like it. However, after 4 or 5 attempts, I’ve come to this conclusion: from top to bottom I am completely uninspired every time I go.

The older I get, the more important the initial walk-in feeling is. Being greeted to a restaurant with a filthy aquarium that contains something that, quite possibly, might be your dinner is never a good thing. A dirty washroom didn’t help matters much, especially since we were some of the first patrons of the day.

We started with a basic corn and chicken soup, which was totally serviceable. From there, we then moved on to their salt spiced soft shell crab, which had an old, bland batter taste without a trace of crab flavor. Actually, I’m not quite sure the chef remembered the spice that early in the day. We also tried the seafood chow fun which had a nice assortment of fish including squid, cuttlefish, shrimp, and scallops but, unfortunately, it was some of the most flavorless seafood I’ve eaten anywhere. If they didn’t provide soy sauce on the table, there’s no way I could have endured testing all 4 types of fish before giving up on the dish. Maybe someone can answer the question that was on my mind: Is blandness of fish like this a function of its intrinsic lack of quality or is it a chef’s issue? The noodles themselves, though, were well crisped and nicely flavored. I have to give them credit as far as properly cooking the fish. Unfortunately, not grasping the importance of seasoning negated these qualities.

After leaving Silver Seafood, I had my usual ponderings about what makes their fish so unbearably tasteless and decided to stop in down the block to Tank for a palate-cleansing mango smoothie. The moment we walked into Tank, I knew immediately what was absent at Silver Seafood. The aromas drew us into the room. The warm greeting from the staff didn’t hurt either. The two experiences were in stark contrast.

Although some feel that Silver Seafood is making a comeback, I wholeheartedly (and respectfully) disagree. Life’s too short…

Bill Daley, a friend of this board, awards Silver Seafood three forks in the Trib's Cheat Eats section (April 5, 2007). Three forks suggests that SS should be "one of the best," but Bill's admirably candid assesssment makes this evaluation a bit of a stretch. Two forks, very good, might have accorded better with the comments. Given the lack of discussion of SS, Bill's review is worth noting.

I haven't been to SS since its problems and its supposed revival.

I think the owner (or the owner's wife) was killed last week. Has anyone been there since then?

stevez wrote:I think the owner (or the owner's wife) was killed last week. Has anyone been there since then?

Yeah, it's a tragic news!
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/334324,CST-NWS-tran10.article

I remember reading this story, but how do we know the Silver Seafood connection. None of the articles I saw mentioned it. (I don't doubt the posters, I'm just curious how we know.)

mrbarolo wrote:I remember reading this story, but how do we know the Silver Seafood connection. None of the articles I saw mentioned it. (I don't doubt the posters, I'm just curious how we know.)

I am 92.8% certain that I heard this fact in a Channel 5 newscast.

That's too bad. I never quite figured out what was going on there with the wild swings in quality, though things had been smoothed out for a little while, at least with regard to the simple veg and seafood preps I order. At its original best, the owner was a very cool young lady whose family was from Macau (I think she said). Not Vietnamese, like the folks mentioned in the press. I'm thinking a sale of the place must have triggered the nose-dive that happened a few winters ago.