Review: Wonton King in University City

When my good friend, the Old China Hand, takes his wallet out of his pocket to pay for his share of dinner at a Chinese restaurant, white flakes flutter everywhere. It looks as if a snowstorm has hit the restaurant.  Well, the OCH usually carries fortune cookie slips from meals consumed in the last month or so, and the exercise of chasing them down and picking them up provides enough additional appetite for another course or two.

But the Guru was shocked when two recent -- and highly enjoyable -- visits to Wonton King, a recent arrival on the Chinese restaurant roster, provided not a crumb of a cookie nor a scrap of advice.

Janet Kha, the kind and attentive woman who helped us order, and translated the Chinese list of specials into English on one visit, told us that the chef, William Huynh, had come here from Vancouver, home of dozens of superior Asian restaurants. Maybe the cookies are coming, but by a slower means of transportation.

Just east of the site that once was revered as home to a giant Steak ‘n Shake and the chain's regional office, and is now a Chinese bakery, Wonton King is part of a small strip mall known as China Town Square. The shiny new restaurant, with a large fish tank and traditional photos on the walls, has a menu of nearly 300 dishes, though there is some duplication here and there.

The menu also calls Wonton King "the first Hong Kong style restaurant in St. Louis," though it's difficult to determine exactly what that means. There are lots of noodle dishes, and an emphasis on seafood, just as there is on the Pacific island, and a long list of items served with congee, the Asian rice porridge that is a favorite dish, often for breakfast. It's rather bland, but it can be pepped up by adding anything from pork and beef to prawns and scallops. Wonton King offers it plain, or with a choice of 15 different additives.

Hong Kong also is major noodle territory, and now diners in St. Louis can have braised noodles, pan-fried noodles or noodles in soup, again in what seems like dozens of combinations. Barbecued duck, chicken or pork, vegetables and seafood are the base for entrees, many with similar sauces and a different base, and there's the famous "hot pot," a large bowl that houses a soupy, rich mixture that can range from beef with mushrooms to salty fish with chicken and tofu, to a dish as esoteric as mushrooms with duck webs.

Wonton King is proud -- and justly -- of its won tons, which are lighter than any other won tons we've tried.  They're in soups, often with noodles, sometimes with dumplings and also with beef brisket, fish balls, roast duck, tripe and almost anything else one could imagine.

Dishes are marked to show spiciness, but we did not find an overly exuberant hand with peppers.  The hot and sour soup, for example, was tasty and very good, but did not burn, and even kim chee, listed here as spicy sour cabbage for an appetizer, was tangy but not painful. We've had it murderously hot in some restaurants, but it's still great stuff. Just eat smaller amounts. Yu Hsiang eggplant, described to us as in a garlic sauce, was splendid, with the slender Asian eggplants sliced into chunks and in a properly garlicky sauce that showed the sweet-hot edge that seems to come from bead molasses and several hot peppers.

It was a delicious dish, and a reminder that vegetarians can usually do very well in Asian restaurants, with a wide range of choices and some deliciously prepared dishes.

And Wonton King also has a handful of entrees marked for special diets and including steamed scallops, bean curd, chicken and shrimp with vegetables and prepared without salt, sugar, corn starch or msg.  Plain steamed vegetables also are available.

Speaking of appetizers, we found steamed pot stickers to be rather standard, with a thick coating of dough over lightly spiced meat. Noodles with sesame sauce were tasty, but not distinctive, leaving the soups, either hot and sour or a rich chicken broth with won ton as the winners, along with one of the specials, translated from the Chinese into chitterlings, or chit'lins, deep fried and rich and slightly strange of texture, but tasty. An appetizer order of roast pork is another superior way to begin the meal.

A hot pot (which refers to temperature and not spicing) of fresh oysters with barbecued pork, plus some bok choy, tofu and a rich broth, was spectacular, with the big, fat oysters giving up their juices to the pork and sauce. Big chunks of roast pork, a red-skinned constant in Chinese restaurants since my boyhood, were lean and smoky, with flavors that were almost delicate.

Another vegetarian dish, also from the table card in translation, was a stew of bok choy, big black mushrooms and sweet, tender, delicious tofu.  Lots of flavors running around, with the tannin of those big mushrooms, a lifelong favorite, remaining in the mouth. Fresh clams in satay sauce, slightly spicy and with added tang from thin shoots of fresh ginger, young enough so they have not become stringy and tough. A generous handful of fresh green onions provided flavor and color.

Still wandering in experimental areas (there are Asian proverbs about new foods bringing added intelligence or added years, and we hoped for that extra benefit), we sampled "steamed minced pork with salty fish," and found it delightful, but we like the flavor that comes from fish that has a hint of fermentation. It covered the bottom of a round glass serving dish, both ingredients minced rather finely. The texture was not unlike meat loaf without the superfluous bread crumbs or other binder. The flavor was not strong, but as I said, had a slightly fermented quality. Not spicy, but with flavors of both pork and fish, and a definite feeling of salt. I liked it, but through the years I have found that I'm fond of a lot of strange flavors, things I would never have learned if I hadn't had an experimental gene somewhere inside.

Many of the Wonton King dishes are heightened with ginger, and the bok choy was sweet and delicious. So was tofu, and the two ingredients blend to create something special.

The menu includes lots of standards, too, for those who prefer cashew chicken, moo shu pork, sweet and sour pork, shrimp with lobster sauce or snow peas, twice cooked pork, beef with broccoli and all the other traditional dishes that have brightened Chinese menus through the years. But it's also nice to see numerous Chinese restaurants in St. Louis that offer much, much more. And that's a treat for all of us.

But the Guru still misses the fortune cookies.