The Essentials: Ed's Potsticker House

Hi - This is my first post to these message boards. I find a lot of the reviews extremely helpful because they are written by folks who are knowledgable as well as honest. I am going to give my honest reviews and hope that the knowledge builds over time. My husband and I just tried Ed's for the first time. The soup dumplings were excellent though less soupy than I had expected; they have a very subtle chive and ginger flavouring that is outstanding. Someone else's post about how to "properly" eat the dumplings by using a spoon and biting the top off to put the chili sauce and soy/vinegar sauce is a brilliant tip to enjoy these dumplings. The cigar dumplings were also quite good with a very clean tasting filling similar to the soup dumplings; the pork stuffed green onion pancakes are awesome, though I would have preferred some extra shredded green onions to be added to the dish.

We ordered the seafood hot and sour soup and the cumin lamb also. The seafood in the soup was actually quite fresh and good, although I am used to Moon Palace's hot and sour so was a bit disturbed by the lack of flavoring beyond a lot of black pepper in Ed's version.

The lamb was really a problem - I read the comment posted below and felt like I have to second the possibility that they are not using lamb in their lamb dishes. The main problem with the cumin lamb dish, however, wasn't that the meat was unidentifiable but that they had used about 6 tablespoons of cumin seeds and about 1/2 a cup of whole red chilies in the dish for what was about 8 oz. of "lamb". At that point I think boiled shoe leather would have been a safe substitute. What little "sauce" was in the dish was salty, and the huge chunks of uncooked jalapenos and onions were simply offensive to pick around.

I would recommend Ed's for the appetizers, and would appreciate any other suggestions for main courses there.

Kathleen

bjt wrote:My girlfriend, her toddler and I ate at Ed's a couple of Fridays ago. We had the soup dumplings, the cigar dumplings, the crispy eggplant and we ordered the Lamb & Green Onion (rather than the Lamb with Cumin which the waiter said was spicy--we had a little one with us). Everything was delightful but when we took one bite of the "lamb" with green onion both of us sort of paused. Eyebrows went up. It looked like chicken, it smelled like chicken, it had the texture of chicken. It WAS chicken. Or if it wasn't chicken I don't know what it was but it was certainly not in any way related to lamb. I have been eating lamb since I could hold up a fork, my aunt raised them so we got lots of free lamb. And at first I thought, what the heck maybe they ran out of lamb. But it was undercooked so it actually didn't taste so great. When we asked the waiter if it was in fact chicken, he shook his head and was adamant that no, it was lamb. So there we were, in a funny but also awkward Monty Python-esque situation. We didn't make a fuss but we were a little muddled. Hey, I don't know my offal so well and I don't know exotic vegetables but I know the difference between the thing with wings that goes "cluck" and the little furry guy that says "baaaa." Our big joke was "hey, it's no big deal it tastes just like chicken!" But we didn't want chicken. I'd go back, I might even go back and order the Lamb with Cumin to see if that's how you get the actual lamb.

bjt