Seven Stars Pepper is a hot new Greenwood option
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Going no farther than a two-block radius in any direction from 85th and Greenwood Avenue, a person could probably eat in a different restaurant every day for a month. With all that competition, you'd think the arrival last December of a new restaurant might go unnoticed for a while.
Not so.
"I'm picky," e-mails Marshall Tarbert, a former U.S. Army Chinese interpreter, who likes Chinese food a lot.
He haunts the Chinatown International District and Little Saigon once a week. He knows there must be a thousand delightful mom-and-pop places in the South End, but "as a disabled senior, they're mostly beyond me."
"To my joy," writes this finicky Phinney resident, "I discovered a new restaurant here in the Greenwood district, Seven Stars Pepper."
Take a friend, cautions Tarbert, because two dinner items can feed three people.
No kidding. The pot of won-ton soup alone ($4.25) could satisfy four as a starter. In a gingery broth, at least half a dozen bigger-than-bite-sized dumplings float among napa cabbage leaves and chopped green onion as gracefully as tropical fish. It is one of the few dishes on the large menu not designated hot and spicy — though you can have it that way, too.
Chef Cheng Biao Yang, owner with his wife, Hoang Ngo, of this tidy little red-and-white storefront eatery, cooked for 20 years in the Szechuan province of China, where fiery food is the norm.
Take out or eat in before 5 p.m. and choose from more than two dozen lunch specials ($3.95-$4.95) served with soup and rice. The 80-plus items on the dinner menu are always available. Some house specialties are handwritten on a whiteboard, but you'd have to read Chinese to know they include such nibbles as pickled pigs' ears.
Hot pots are a house specialty. Designed for two or more to share ($9.95 per person/kids under 7 free), thinly sliced meats, tofu, napa cabbage, noodles and bean threads are cooked at the table in a communal pot of bubbling broth.
If your food isn't as mouth-numbing as you'd like, avail yourself of another hot pot — the jar of chili paste adjacent to the everlastingly dewy faux red rose ornamenting each pristine white tabletop. If you are very fortunate, at meal's end you will be gifted not only with fortune cookies, but with strips of still-warm, sugar-coated fried dough.
Check please
Chong Gin Hot Chicken: Three kinds of peppers, some nearly whole, infuse nubbins of crispy chicken and green beans with searing heat, culminating in a can't-get-enough-of-it confluence of salty, crunchy, meaty and spicy. In China, our waitress explains, they would leave out the beans and add even more peppers.
Dry Fried Prawns in Sweet & Hot Sauce: Think shrimp cocktail and you've got the flavor profile of these prawns, a bountiful catch bedded on bok choy. The bright tomato flavor of the sauce has a sweet edge reminiscent of ketchup, and plenty of heat from horseradish, garlic and chili peppers.
Sun Keung Lamb: Cumin is the main ingredient in this sultry, intriguing combination of tender lamb, onion, scallions, ginger and chili peppers.
Itemized bill, meal for two:
Chong Gin Hot Chicken: $9.95
Dry Fried Prawns in Sweet & Hot Sauce: $8.95
Sun Keung Lamb: $8.95
Tax: $2.59
Total: $30.44
Providence Cicero: providencecicero@aol.com.
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