Thursday, 02 March 2006

• Joy Food One

  You'd think living in a Chinese family and being surrounded by Chinese restaurants would stop us from having Chinese food in Columbus, Ohio.  It doesn't seem like the case for us.  After months of being here, we've tried out SO many restaurants so we decided to try out a new place for Chinese. The Joy Food One restaurant was our destination.  It's in a well kept plaza with lots of parking.  This isn't one of those ugly strip malls that you might be accustomed to.

  Inside the have the sit down restaurant style.  You get lots of cat statues with one paw lifted up and old classic Chinese tunes - It sounds like those you might hear at Disney's Epcot center. The other side, that I didn't take a picture of, is the take out part of the restaurant.  It resembles the ones you see at the food court with pictures of the dishes hovering over the cashier. The restaurant owners speak some version of Mandarin so we couldn't pull out our Cantonese to speak to them. Our meal took 30 minutes to get to us as we sat and drank some kind of tea.  You don't really get to choose what kind of tea so just drink up and enjoy.

  We ordered two dishes.  The first was a classic beef and broccoli and the second was the special for the day, pepper salt pork.  Each dish came with rice. The beef broccoli had a weird brown sauce.  It was a bit thicker than I was accustomed to, so I tried not to injest too much of it for fears of taking in too much MSG. The pepper salt pork didn't look like what i had expected. It was decorated very well with cut up oranges surrounding the pork.  The pork was not too salty but it was wet and not the usual dry outside.  It was very hot though.  I enjoyed the pork.  It wasn't dry inside and the outside coating wasn't soggy.  The pork even looked like it was real pork and not minced or bad parts. Overall the food was alright.  It was good not eating American-style Chinese.  I was not in the mood to eat spring rolls and chicken balls.  We felt VERY full after the meal.  Our meal came out to $12 per person with tips but without drinks so it's not too bad on the wallet.  Walking out of it, I think we might come back to this restaurant but we'd suggest bringing more people to share the dishes.

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