Dinersty's not perfect, but it is cheap



THE ANN ARBOR NEWS

THURSDAY, AUGUST 22, 1991

food talk

Dinersty’s not perfect, but it is cheap

By LAURA McREYNOLDS

NEWS RESTAURANT REVIEWER_________________

Cheap Chinese take-out has come to downtown Ann Arbor. And I think I speak for all of us who work downtown when I say, OH THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

You know- how it goes. Some days you want falafel. Others, a burrito. Or pizza, or a chili dog with cheese. But then there comes a day when your usual favorites just don’t ring your bell. That’s when you want Chinese, the one food that’s right when everything else sounds wrong.

Enter Dinersty, a spin-off from a small East Coast chain turning out fast food interpretations of traditional and nouvelle Chinese cuisine. It’s not great, but it doesn’t have to be. That’s the beauty of Chinese food: If it’s cheap, plentiful and readily accessible, decent will more than suffice.

Dinersty looks like a sophisticated fast food joint, with streamlined decor in muted grays and purples, and a long formica counter for placing and picking up orders. In the open kitchen, white-clad workers chop fresh chickens, ladle out soup and man the woks in a constant bustle of focused activity. The counter side is less organized, with as many as three different people filling bits and pieces of each order and only one overworked employee actually taking them. Things aren’t helped much by the fact that order numbers like “002162” get called out as “62.”

Many of the dishes are easy to like, but

you’ve got to know how to pick and choose. Overall, the criticisms of any fast food menu can be applied here: too much fat, way too much salt. Dinersty’s emphasis on mass production and mass appeal means some inevitable sacrifices; some dishes are clumsy and heavy, many are woefully under-seasoned.

Still, if you know what to order, you can get lots of nice, crunchy vegetables, lean meat and a light sauce. Try finding that at the burger joints.

Appetizers are not a strong suit. I love egg rolls, but these are soggy and soaked with grease from sitting around, one of the few items that tasted like stale pre-fab. Steamed pork dumplings (usually called pot stickers) tasted undercooked, with big gummy wads of dough wrapped around pink pureed mystery meat. Boneless BBQ spare ribs were just poor quality: rubbery and greasy with an unpleasant charred aftertaste.

Drunken chicken was one of the most disgusting looking dishes I’ve ever come across. It’s an unidentifiable piece of chicken marinated in Chinese wine, poached and subsequently attacked with a meat cleaver. The whole grisly works gets served up cold —

bones, marrow, skin, meat — topped with cucumbers and, bafflingly, a hot tomato slice. If you can get past the macabre appearance, you’ll find you’re eating plain, salty boiled chicken. It’s not worth the trauma.

Soups are nothing special, but for a mere $1.30, a pint of won ton makes a cheap, filling lunch. The w’on tons are big, doughy and plentiful, stuffed with tiny little balls of ground meat and floating in a strong, oily chicken broth with scallions and pork strips. The vegetable tofu soup is delicate and pretty, with crunchy water chestnuts, snow peas and bamboo shoots contrasting with tender straw mushrooms and soft squares of tofu.

Almost every item on the menu is way too salty, but some dishes are worse than others. String beans sauteed with ground shrimp were perfectly prepared to a squeaky tender/crisp, but they came coated with a sauce that was pure saline. I ended up rinsing the beans in a strainer and eating them by hand like french fries. They were delicious - but not worth four bucks.

Most of the starred “hot” items are disappointingly mild. The one exception: the oily but excellent Singapore-style rice noodles, a

Dinersty’s emphasis on mass production and mass appeal means some inevitable sacrifices; some dishes are clumsy and heavy, many are woefully under-seasoned.

satisfying pile of slippery noodles, baby shrimp, roast pork, red pepper and egg brightened with hot yellow curry. This is spicy enough to satisfy hardy palates without blowing the roof off delicate ones.

Some of the best items are the most ple-bian, like classic pepper steak with lots of crisp green pepper. Chicken with cashew nuts offered few surprises, but was packed with lots of tender chicken and salty cashews, a good buy for $4.50. Shrimp with garlic sauce was even better, five enormous shrimp along with bamboo shoots, green pepper, water chestnuts and mushrooms in a spicy brown garlic sauce with just enough heat to set lips tingling.

One of my guilty pleasures is Dinersty’s General Tso chicken, a defiantly unhealthy dish featuring deep-fried battered chicken and broccoli in a sweet, sticky hot garlic sauce. I’m not so big on sweet and sour, virtually the same thing served this time with a cup of lurid candy apple red sauce spiked with crinkle-cut carrots. Such distinctions were beyond my lunch companions, who inhaled both dishes and asked for more.

Moo shi (usually called moo shu) shrimp was heavy but good, an appealing jumble of shrimp, cabbage and shredded egg you wrap in soft pancakes spread with dark, heady plum sauce. This is a higher-end item at $8, but it’s generously portioned; we ran out of pancakes long before we ran out of filling.

In a sharp departure from most Chinese restaurants, Dinersty puts an unexpected emphasis on seafood. Some of the 25 dishes are Chinese standards like Happy Family, a clean-tasting combination of shrimp, scallops, chicken and roast pork sauteed with vegetables in a clear, briny sauce. Others are more eccentric, like sliced conch or jala-peno squid. We closed our eyes and leapt into the unknown with mussels on the shell in smoked soybean sauce. We wanted to like this, but perhaps our tastes are hopelessly pedestrian. The mussels were plentiful but rubbery, and the thick, dark soybean sauce just tasted like liquid smoke.

During peak hours, Dinersty is packed, especially late at night when most other restaurants have shut down (Dinersty is open until midnight). If you don’t want to wait in line for the 10 minutes or so it will take to fill your order, simply phone or fax ahead. Despite their slogan, “If you can’t get to Chinatown, Dinersty brings Chinatown to you,” Dinersty doesn’t deliver.

restaurant

review

Dinersty

241 East Liberty 998-0008

Food .................... 7 out oMO

Service ................. 7 out of 10

Atmosphere .............. 7 out of 10

Hours: Monday-Saturday 11 a m. to midnight, Sunday noon to 10 p.m.

Liquor: None.

Plastic: None.

Prices: Inexpensive to moderate; entrees run $2.90 to $13.50.

Wheelchair Access: Awkwardly accessible through the art gallery next door; tight maneuvering once inside.