Qi: Divine Dim Sum

Five lunching ladies got together for dim sum brunch at Qi this past weekend.  Pretty much impeccable, from the decor to the place settings to the food, and especially the company as our group has bonded over food for many years now. And everything tastes better amidst friendship and laughter, though Qi's food and presentation does not need much assistance. 

From the entrance on 6th Street, the wine walls form two private dining areas.

Main dining area, with kitchen to the back and bar to the right.
 Could see a number of women preparing foods at the counter.

Our table, in the smaller of the two more private areas was called the birdcage table on our bill. Throughout the restaurant, there were beautiful embroidered Chinese robes on the walls. I would love a time to just study the decor in there! 

Beautiful plates, nice heavy crystal water glasses, and even the chopsticks had a nice weight and feel to them. 

In order of how we received the food. First up, sticky rice with Chinese sausage.

Snow pea shoots

Zha Jiang noodles, kind of a Chinese bolognese. I believe they said the meat was a combo of beef and lamb,
and you mix everything together before serving. Loved this!

The utterly divine crab fish maw soup dumplings. You could taste the sweetness of the crab meat. We should have ordered more of these! The accompanying sauces were soy, chili, and a light vinegar (plum?) with julienned ginger that was lovely with the soup dumplings.

Scallion pancake curry dip. This is the one dish that wasn't as great as everything else. The curry sauce was very flavorful,
 but the pancake was thick and almost tough, without any of the real flakiness I expect from scallion pancakes.

They changed our plates out partway though. 

Steamed barbecue pork buns; nice flavor in the pork.

Chicken with cashew dumplings. This isn't a dumpling combo I have had before, and I really liked them.

Shrimp har kaw.

The adorable little creatures are lobster dumplings with a hint of truffle in them, making them extra decadent!

Even the restrooms spared no design expense. From my travels to Japan, I have learned there is an Asian fascination with toilets. These had the motion activated lids, warm seats and automatic flush. (If you haven't used them before, you don't always know what to expect or even how to operate them at times!) Gorgeous carved wooden sink, very much a masculine-feeling space.

Here's our order. And it came out to $37/person with tax and tip. Not bad at all!

Qi was fantastic, and I can't wait to go back! Have you been and if so, what were your favorites?

Bao'd Up is Open in Sunset Valley!

Pork belly guabao, one of my favorite items at Bao'd Up

BIG THANKS to Bao'd Up for 1) opening in South Austin 😊 and 2) having me out for lunch. This is a sponsored post, but all opinions are my own. I was not monetarily compensated for this post, nor was one requested from me. I am here to spread the good gospel of Bao'd Up!

Tables

I met my friend Rebecca of The Honest Foodist (check out her blog and especially her Instagram Stories!) for lunch at Bao'd Up on Friday, where we sampled a number of items on the menu.  They are located at 5207 Brodie Lane, right next door to Tarka and down from Petsmart.

When you walk in to Bao'd Up, there are four self-serve terminals on your right.  You do your own ordering, and it gives you options to customize like rice instead of noodles on the bowls. 

There are even options with the boba or bubble teas, from different flavors, to bases, to sweetness options. You can also place a to go order online. Once you pay, your receipt will have a bar code, or if ordering online, you'll receive a confirmation code. Don't throw your receipt out!

There are a couple screens inside the restaurant that show your name and order status. Once your order is ready, it is placed inside one of these lockers and it shows "completed" by your name on the screen. You either scan your receipt or enter your code on the keypad, and a locker door pops open.

Ta dah! There's your food! (And so if you're ordering online, you may never have to interact with staff at Bao'd but that doesn't mean you should forgo a tip.)

Yum yum! More explanation on what everything is, coming up!

Alex the manager admitted sometimes it's even hard for him to tell the pork bao apart! 😉 

Dang, I can't make this video larger. Here's Rebecca breaking bao (BBQ pork).

Brisket bao, a tasty Texas twist!

My favorite of the baos was the pork belly guabao (taco style) that's pictured at the very top of this post. The pork belly was so tender, it fell apart like pulled pork. And the flavors were phenomenal, though messy to eat!

This was my other favorite of everything we had, the spicy pork bowl with soft boiled egg and veggies. We got this with rice, but I will SO be getting this again with noodles! The pork had such a wonderful flavor and a nice medium spice level.  I am kind of drooling thinking about it right now! I loved this. 

I think this was Rebecca's favorite, the braised chicken bowl, which we got with gluten free glass noodles (I think they were Korean sweet potato noodles). The chicken must have cooked for ages because the meat fell off the bone and had a light Chinese five spice seasoning to it. She said it reminded her of her family's home style Vietnamese food.

Top left is the crispy fish guabao, where they use barramundi, a Pacific ocean fish, also known as Asian sea bass. It was nicely fried, meaty, and really good. Top right is the pork belly guabao, and at the bottom is chicken katsu (fried chicken cutlet). 

Not pictured is the egg cream bao, which I remember from their Mueller location, because it made me a fan of  them! And this one did not disappoint. Sunset Valley is now the third location for Bao'd Up, with Mueller as the original, and they opened on Rio Grande + 22nd Street earlier this summer. I am so thankful Bao'd Up has come to South Austin, as I honestly don't know a place down here that serves bao. A wonderful new spot for us Southies to enjoy! More Asian food, please!

Thanks again to Alex and the Bao'd Up team for having us for lunch!

Mural, part of the fun vibe at Bao'd Up. There's a similar one at the Mueller location too.

Update: Fat Dragon

I first visited Fat Dragon last fall, and wrote about them in December, as part of an Asian food binge at the time.  They invited me for lunch this week to try some of their new menu items, and I thank them for the opportunity and hospitality!

Soy braised salmon is one of their new items. It's a big 16 oz portion and the skin was crisp!

For my vegetarian friend, vegetarian dumplings are a nice option. In the lower basket are beef and leek ones.

I added a little julienned ginger and chili oil to my beef + leek dumplings. Extremely tender beef. I forgot to ask for them pan fried, but they were still delicious.

Hong Kong style braised tofu and veggies.

From previous meals at Fat Dragon, here are a couple of my faves: dry fried green beans.

Lamb cilantro dumplings are amazing.

Crispy pork belly gua bao.

Go visit Fat Dragon at 183 and Spicewood Springs!
8650 Spicewood Springs, open Tuesday - Sunday 11 am - 9 pm

Sichuan River

Sichuan River (from the owners of A+A Sichuan in North Austin)  has taken over the Tien Jin Chinese restaurant at 4534 Westgate Blvd (on the Hwy 290 eastbound frontage road at Westgate; same strip center as Black Swan Yoga and Sap's Thai). Can't say I had ever been to Tien Jin, but I have now had food from Sichuan River three times in two and a half weeks.

My first time, I got eggplant in garlic sauce for carry out, along with the fried dumplings. My butcher friend had been there, and I thought he had said he had the eggplant with pork, which is what I asked for when I called. Turns out the pork isn't normally part of this dish (I've had it that way at Asia Cafe a place I really really like in far northwest ATX) but they had no problem adding it in. Verdict: thumbs up! Although after I had posted the picture on Facebook, one comment was that it looked like a dismembered Smurf. The eggplant is incredibly tender and the sauce was mildly sweet with a hint of a twang. The dumplings were a bit of a miss, but I am partially to blame, as they sat in a styrofoam container for 20+ minutes, and the ensuing condensation negated any crispiness that pan-frying gave them. I'd order them again, but only if I was eating there. On the plus side, the dough for the dumplings was much, much better than that at Asia Cafe, where it is WAY too thick, and the soy sauce-based dipping sauce breathed some life into them. Oh, and the eggplant dish, which comes with rice? I got three meals out of that!

The second trip, I went to dine in with a Thai friend. She wanted to try some of the cold specialty dishes, namely pig ears and crunchy jellyfish, as she has had them in Thailand, and she wanted to see how they would compare. While these are not normally dishes I would go for, I was willing to try. And now I can say I tried them, and don't need to try them again. For some, I am sure they are wonderful. But for me, they were both very similar in texture: cartilaginous.  Both were fairly bland, gelatinous, and a touch crunchy, the pig ear more so. You can't really see it, but there was some very nice julienned cucumber slices under the jellyfish. In my defense, my Thai friend didn't especially love them either.

I ordered the dan dan noodles, which I had been tipped off by the butcher that they were good, but NOT on the printed menu. Oh, no problem, said the waitress. Now, when I've had dan dan noodles in the past, they've had a decent amount of ground meat with them. These did not, but they did have the nice chili oil, a mild Sichuan peppercorn flavor, and a nice firm quality to the egg noodles. I would definitely get this again.

The third trip was dinner with my friends who first introduced me to Asia Cafe many years ago. There were five of us total, and we agreed to order a variety and just split everything. We started with some hot and sour soup, which seemed heavy on the white pepper, but not enough sour for my liking. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't anything memorable. The rest of the meal fared much better! The dry fried green beans were a touch salty, but yummy, and still a bright green (as in NOT overcooked) color.

We ordered the eggplant in garlic sauce (just as is, no pork) which was again really good, though the sauce might have been just a bit on the thick side, and I would probably ask for it with pork again.

Butcher friend had also recommended the Sizzling Sichuan Lamb, and yeah, it was spot on! It's spicy, though you could probably have them dial it back a bit (see the dried red chiles and the sliced jalapenos?!). And tender. So tender. Very heavy on the cumin (yes, not just for Latin foods!), and a little bit of Sichuan peppercorn again. I love lamb, so I was very happy. Oh, and butcher friend has always loved Asia Cafe for it's tripe, stomach, and other "weird" parts; he's been extremely happy at Sichuan River so if that's your thing, go for it!

My friends are BIG egg foo young fans, so their eyes got REAL wide when they saw it on the menu, so we ordered the pork version. This did not disappoint, and they went as far as to say it was the best EFY they had had in a very very long time. It was crispy, because they serve the sauce on the side -- genius! And what is EFY, you might ask? Think of it as the Chinese version of an omelet. And really good.

Our final dish was jumbo sesame shrimp. On the plus, the shrimp were lightly crisp, but on the negative, the sauce was just way too thick and almost cloyingly sweet. Someone had a very heavy hand with the cornstarch in making the sauce. Shrimp good, sauce not so much.

The nice thing about having a larger group of people, is not only can you try a variety, but the cost seems to go down. We paid $15 each, and that included tip.  And while they seemed a bit short handed (but all the food came in a timely manner), the only other real drawback that we noticed was the lazy susan at our table could really use a good scrubbing and re-coating of protective oil; it was clean but sticky/tacky.

Why am I so excited to have a Sichuan place in South Austin? I believe it's the first place really serving authentic Sichuan (Szechuan/Szechwan) down south. And they're not heavy on the Americanized Chinese dishes, though they do have some if that's your thing. And on this Saturday night, the clientele was two-thirds Chinese, and by the time we left, they had a good-sized crowd. And they are close to my work, so I see more nights of eggplant with pork in my future. Both times I have eaten there, I've had the same waitress who is very good, and speaks good English and has good humor. I am starting to hear a bit of a buzz about Sichuan River, and for those of us in South Austin, this is a great addition to our food scene.