This dish was so wonderful because the chicken was so fresh -- you could just taste it. That's why I love Chinese chicken cooked whole -- the difference between its freshness and the a thawed hunk of freezer meat you'd get in other restaurants is so obvious. This chicken was accompanied by a healthy-sized bowl of cooking oil and garlic chunks for dipping. Glorious.

Then there was beef and broccoli. I was a bit surprised to see this -- I remembered an anecdote that my Mandarin teacher at Baruch had shared about the first meal she ate in the U.S. Her companion had escorted her to a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, and proudly ordered her beef and broccoli, to show how tasty American renditions of Chinese food could be. The thing was, my teacher (a Beijing native) said, Chinese people rarely eat beef and they don't have American broccoli -- she had no idea what the dish before here was! So much for typical Chinese food.

Whether or not this is in fact a common dish, this chef prepared it superbly. The beef was very tender and the broccoli was a tad undercooked, allowing the flowerets to soak up the meaty sauce but the stalks to remain crunchy.

Having grandparents who love seafood meant that the next dish, abalone giant squid, was also familiar to me. For those who have never had this yummy creature at your table, it is similar in flavor to squid, but softer and bouncier in the mouth. I believe the scored texture results from chef's deliberate knife work, though correct me if I'm wrong. These were not the freshest abalone giant squid I have ever tasted, but I was pretty far inland, so that is not surprising.

This preparation featured sweet red and yellow peppers and one of my favorites -- earthy black mushrooms. I just adore the squishy, satisfying texture of a mushroom, inebriated with the full flavor of the dish.

Finally, one of my new favorites -- shrimps fried with a bazillion hot peppers. The shrimp are first tossed in a light batter, and then surrounded on all sides by these spicy chile peppers. I think the peppers are cooked just long enough to give off heat that the batter can absorb.

You can eat the heads too -- since the shrimp are kind of small, the skins are crunchy, so you can bypass the painstaking peeling process.

We topped the meal off with Singo beer, a local brew. Not bad for a Chinese beer (which is by definition, pale and watery), and a fine accompaniment to a great meal. We left sated and ready to continue our Halloween celebration.