Located at 1207 Columbus St., Ching Yen Restaurant offers a convenient place for Bakersfield College students to grab lunch between classes, and their reasonably priced lunch specials make it even harder to resist when the cravings for a good Chinese meal strike.
Ching Yen has a relatively small dining room decorated in a manner that some might perceive as cluttered. Traditional ink and wash paintings of flowers hang next to garishly colored cardboard decorations that look as if they were purchased at a party store, with flowering plants and paper decorations hanging from the ceiling. While all of this might seem distracting, somehow it actually works in this case. The decorations, collected over the restaurant’s 22-year history, set a mood that puts you at ease, as if you were entering a home rather than a restaurant.
My companion and I were seated immediately upon entering and given water and a pot of hot tea. In fact, the tea had been steeped in water that was too hot, bruising its delicate flavors a bit and bringing out the bitterness.
The wait to place our order seemed slightly longer than what we expected, but our hostess explained that she was alone in the dining room this day, when she usually had more people serving. Still the wait was not excessive for a lunch rush, and it gave us time to fully explore the menu.
All of the staples of a Chinese restaurant were present on the menu including mu shu pork, orange chicken, kung pao chicken and several styles of fried rice and noodle dishes, along with a surprising number of specialty Mandarin and Szechwan dishes such as crispy duck, Szechwan sea scallops and Hunan beef. Prices were on the high side of moderate with lunch specials starting around $6, and full dinners running between $9 and $15 per person.
We decided to order from the lunch specials, with my companion ordering the “spicy flavored pork” and I tried the “Ching Yen combination plate.” The lunch specials are served with a small bowl of the house special egg flower soup, steamed rice, and appetizers consisting of a vegetable spring roll and fried pork won ton. We also ordered a plate of crab Rangoon as an additional appetizer.
The soup was the first to arrive and I found it to be much thicker than what I have grown accustom to in egg flower soup.
The inclusion of colorful vegetables and pink crabmeat along with its thickness not only made for a rich and tasty soup, but it illustrated a key fundamental of Mandarin cuisine, that the food should delight the eye as well as the palette, and this would be a theme repeated throughout the meal with great effect.
Also of note were the crab Rangoon appetizers. Made by wrapping a mixture of crabmeat and cream cheese in a won ton wrapper and frying them, these little packets of heaven were easily the best I have ever had.
The combination plate I ordered consisted of nicely sized portions of sweet and sour pork, cashew chicken, chow Mein and mixed vegetables, all were quite good, but the true star of the plate was the sweet and sour pork.
It perfectly embodied the second goal of Mandarin cuisine, which is to take opposite elements and combine them in a pleasing way.
The dish blended the textures of tender pork with a crisp coating, and covered it with a thick sauce that also blended the tastes of sweet and sour in such a way that the bold flavors of the sauce complimented the subtly of the meat. It was truly delightful.
I found that to be true of almost all of the sauces we encountered. Although the sauces were thick and richly flavored, I did not feel that they overpowered their dishes with one exception. The sauce on the spicy flavored pork seemed like an orchestra playing slightly out of tune. It was a jumble of different flavors that never really came together. The spiciness of the dish seemed forced, and while I would not go so far as to say it was bad, it was definitely not as good as the rest of the meal.
We finished our meal with a true delight, and one that Susan, our hostess, told is something of a dying art in Asian cuisine: candied fruit. The process is as much of a show as it is a dessert. Chunks of apple or banana are coated with a sugar syrup and sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds. Then they are set on fire and brought to your table still flaming.
Using chopsticks, Susan then took the pieces, one by one, and placed them in a bowl of ice water for a few seconds before placing them on our plates.
The result is a crunchy candy shell made of caramelized sugar covering the fruit. It was delicious.
I would recommend Ching Yen Restaurant to anyone looking for a nice relaxing meal. Good food, good service, good restaurant.