Mini Garden Orient & Vegetarian Cuisine
For a couple of weeks I've been driving by this place hoping to stop in for a quick bite. A chance meeting with a friend a couple of blocks away brought me here for a late lunch just a few days ago.
According to the sign, Mini Garden has been open for about a month now and inside it really shows. Although most of the detail work is completed, there is still a lot more to be done -- covering the plywood at the front counter, putting the facing on the banquettes along the walls and painting the trim around portions of the ceiling.
There is another Mini Garden located in Chinatown and for the most part, their noodle dishes are quite good. So, in the interest of seeing what the rest of the menu is like, I decided to order different things today.
To start off, I decided on the pan fried onion pancake (US$3.25).
Way back when, this used to be one of my favorite dishes to order at both Korean restaurants, and at Chinese ones too. Here the pancake was light and crisp and just a little too oily. There were lots of green onions in this, but for some reason this pancake was quite flavorless.
The next dish was the pan fried spinach with garlic (US$5.25).
This dish was OK as it was done in the standard fashion. What I liked about this was that the garlic didn't overpower the dish. The subtle garlic flavor enhanced the flavor of the spinach nicely.
For the mains, we decided on two dishes. The first to arrive was the honey and garlic chicken (US$7.95).
Pieces of boneless chicken thighs were stir fried with onions in a fairly sweet honey garlic sauce. The sauce was a little too sweet for me, but there was a fair amount of garlic in this creating a bit of balance. I would have liked this more if it were made a bit spicy with the addition of a few dried chillies.
And last, the black pepper beef (US$8.95).
A few slices of beef were stir fried with chopped bell peppers and onions in a thick black pepper sauce. This was really peppery and this could have been my favorite dish because I really enjoyed the sauce. The beef, however, was sliced into large pieces -- six pieces to be exact. This made the beef quite difficult to eat, especially since there was no knife at the table. That coupled with the fact that the beef was tough and dry, made this a disappointment.
I also asked for a hot Hong Kong milk tea, and was told that they only had it cold, so I said OK. It was never delivered to the table.
Although the name of the restaurant suggests vegetarian cuisine, there were only a handful of vegetarian dishes on the menu. The dishes that I tried were average at best and because of the lack of friendliness on the waitstaff's part, I probably won't come back here again. By the way, for those of you that were curious about what happened here on the day that I visited, I decided not to post that story.
For those of you who dine regularly at Little Village Noodle House, one of the waitresses that used to work there now works here.
Mini Garden Orient & Vegetarian Cuisine
2065 South Beretania Street
Telephone: 808.946.3828
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