Source: The Orange County Register
At the very, very center of Islamic Chinese food is a round of sesame-flecked bread, a minor flour-and-water achievement that's as thick as the Bibles smuggled into China, with three or four doughy strata hovering between crispy top and bottom planks.
The bread, which must share DNA with ancient oven-baked Middle Eastern breads, is fine on its own, but even better when it replaces rice to soak up sauce from the shredded chicken with dry bean curd or to dunk into a warm pot of lamb stew.
AH, THE BREAD: The traditional sesame bread at
Mas' Islamic Chinese Restaurant is available
with green onions or in a sweet version.
At Mas' Islamic Chinese restaurant in Anaheim, you'll have to wait at least 15 minutes for an order of it, but that's fine; it's the sort of food that shouldn't be made ahead of time. You can have it stuffed with green onions, or not. There's also a sweet version filled with red bean paste.
The restaurant stands in an industrial section near Fullerton, and with its indoor fountain, large chandelier hanging inside a domed ceiling, red walls and the presence of owner Jamilla Ma in white headdress, it feels as though it dropped down from the sky.
Ma owned the other Islamic Chinese restaurant in Orange County, Jamillah Garden in Tustin, which she sold two years ago. The menu is essentially the same. Plenty of familiar Chinese dishes, all prepared in the Halal way, according to Muslim dietary rules. Pork and alcohol are verboten ingredients.
There's a stronger-than-usual emphasis on lamb and tripe. She serves handmade, nicely chewy noodles. And of course, there's the bread, which doesn't appear too much in Islamic restaurants in China where it's so commonplace in homes no one orders it outside.
Other than that, though, the menu is very familiar to anybody who's ever ordered an egg roll, a pot sticker or kung pao anything. There's a very nice shredded chicken with dry bean curd that's at once mildly sweet and spicy. The hot-braised shrimp is forgettable, but the salt-and-pepper shrimp is worth fighting over, each little pink curl crispy from a coating of its two seasonings and a toss into a sizzling hot pan.
I was underwhelmed by the steamed dumplings and pot stickers (even though the dough draping both was pleasantly toothsome) and the fried calamari, which looked like onion rings, was unremarkable even if its crust was as crispy as it gets.
But the saut¨ed pea-pod leaves, while tasting very familiar, seemed refreshing: bright green leaves still attached to crispy stalks, flecked with garlic and glistening with a touch of sesame oil. The dry saut¨ ed string beans were crunchy and nicely charred in spots and the eggplant with curry, practically a savory pudding, was very good.
The homemade noodles show up in both brothy dishes and chow meins. They're irregular cuts, thick and chewy in spots, more tender at different points along the strands. The lamb stew warm pot is a bracing dish, the broth tinged with anise and other ingredients in Chinese five-spice powder. Big chunks of supremely tender lamb still on the bone float about, although you must negotiate the clinging bits of white fat.
Most beef dishes are worth your time. The stir-fry leek with beef is brazen in its embrace of five-spice powder, the beef deeply red, fully cooked and supple.
Mas' is the place where you want to start with the familiar and then tiptoe over to the cold spicy beef, the cold spicy tripe and the ox tongue in brown sauce. One day, the cold jellyfish might be a weekly necessity. I am an expert from Frbiz Site, usually analyzes all kind of industries situation, such as toyota commuter hiace , atlanta car dealership.
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