Critic's Review
Ordering Chinese food always starts the same way; a person answering the phone in some language from outer space and you're not sure you have the right place. The women said something that didn't sound anything like "Yeung House", so I just said "I'd like to place a take out order please".
Some banter ensued; you order by the number, but there are choices. So I ordered the #18 Lunch with Beef and Fried Rice.
It was 20 minutes before I got there and the food was ready. You can't get a picture in this place; it's an 8 x 8 room with 2 women omnipresent. Plus it's fast; the food was ready so she had her hand out for my card as I walked in the door. "Hunan Beef", I said. She pointed to a box.
The box was pretty busy so I didn't check it, which is my mistake. I should know better.
Rather than getting containers that don't leak, they wrap their containers in plastic bags, which is highly unusual. But the container was filled to the max and was leaking badly, so it's a good thing it was.
It was at this point I realized that I didn't have Hunan Beef. beef is darker than this.
Yikes, what happened here.
I checked the receipt to make sure that there wasn't a language problem. The receipt was correct.
Does this look like Hunan Beef to you? It also wasn't spicy. At. All. So they just completely got the order wrong.
I made myself a bowl. One good thing is that they've changed to the packaged sauces (they used to fill cups from a big jar which required unknown handling).
The rice was kind of weird; smaller than normal for Chinese rice, and it wasn't that good. It tasted steamed rather than stir fried. My big complaint about the chicken (whatever dish it was they made me), was that it wasn't spicy and everything was cut up to chunks that were too big. I'm trying to eat this with chopsticks; it needs to be cut up smaller than this. This is just lazy cooking.
I ended up throwing out the rest of the food; I wasn't going to eat it and my fridge is filled with cooking experiments. About 1/2 hour later I remembered the egg roll. Maybe something would be salvageable here?
The eggroll was cold by now, but I have a technique for re-heating quickly without re-frying it in a pint of oil. Heat up some oil in a wok until it's just about smoking (peanut oil if you have it), and throw in the egg roll and roll it around for a couple of seconds. Then drop in a tablespoon of water and put the lid on the wok. The water steams up immediately. After a minute you have a nice hot egg roll with a crispy outside. The water cooks off quickly so it doesn't make the egg roll soggy.
I took a bite and it wasn't terrible. Just cabbage with a bit of pork in the middle. But it was definitely edible.
Conclusion
You get what you pay for, they say, and this stuff is cheap because the people in charge are still stuck in the 90s. While they give you good portions, it's really not very good food. The fact that they don't bother to cut up the ingredients to proper size tells me that they're just going through the motions.
This place is the same as every other in South Florida; people accept bad food so these restaurants keep cranking out bad food. It's really the same amount of effort to make good Chinese food as bad; so I really don't get what the problem is.
Review 8/3/09
Yeung's is a tiny take out place that doesn't even have a single table for dining in. They're very cordial, they know how to take a phone order without annoying you, and they load up your order with fortune cookies and condiments without having to ask.
The food is unfortunately not as good as the service. There's a shortage of meat in the dishes; pork fried rice has bits of pork that are barely detectable. Dumplings are important to me, and the steamed dumpling here are small and lack the authentic asian taste you'd expect. Its like a lump of tasteless meat stuffed into a wonton shell.
The thing I like the least about Yeung House is the condiments. I like the individual packages of mustard and duck sauce. They give you a spoonful from a big jar in a little pastic cup. I have 2 problems with this. First, the mustard in the packages is better, as it the duck sauce. Second, I know its fresh, and it will keep fresh until the next time I get chinese food. With the cups, you don't know that hair or someone's fingers have been in it, and the only reason they do it is to save a few pennies.