Friday food

My column on WCCO.com is up, and this week's topic is where to go if you don't want to eat Thanksgiving dinner at home. One of the places on the list is not serving a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, at least not in the American sense of Turkey Day feasting.

 

Jun Bo Chinese Restaurant in Richfield. Yes, the name is awfully close to "jumbo," which it is.

 

It's a massive building with several enormous dining rooms. Located, very American-ly, near 494 and adjacent to a big box hardware store.

Why is it that good Asian restaurants are so often in lackluster locations?

Jun Bo offers two menus, one of authentic Chinese food and one of more Americanized choices. Lunch has the obligatory buffet, mostly with the latter types of food. There will be no roast turkey and stuffing on 11/27, but there will be plenty of other things to choose from (why does this make me remember the ending to A Christmas Story?), especially if you decide to skip the menus and go the dim sum route. Jun Bo serves more than 30 dim sum offerings all day, every day, with choices available for the timid to the adventurous.

I was feeling adventurous the day I lunched there. No Americanized buffet for me. No, sir. I went the dim sum route.

 

The large item on the left is sticky rice with egg yolk, wrapped in a leaf of some kind. I did ask, but my server did not speak English well, and I didn't quite understand the answer. My loss. Bottom right is an oh-so-tasty shrimp-cilantro dumpling. And above right?

 

Fried chicken feet. 

Really.

Apparently these are quite the delicacy in China. Before you make any dismissive noises, let's just reflect on the fact that every culture has something that makes other cultures want to retch. Minnesota's beloved lutefisk, for example. Or Iceland's Hakarl. Or, as my friends over at the James J. Hill Library blog pointed out last week, Malaysia's durian. Hey, my brother loves celery topped with spray cheese from a can. We all have our quirks.

So I decided to try the chicken feet. I thought they'd be smaller. You know what they look like? Like alien fingers. Like E.T., or something from the X Files. If those fingers were breaded and fried.

I'll admit I don't get the appeal. To me, they were basically little clumps of fat on bones, not a lot of flavor, and of questionable texture. 

But I tried them. Fortunately the sticky rice and shrimp-cilantro dumplings were wonderful. Because most of the chicken feet got left behind.  

Don't worry. I'm not about to go all Anthony Bourdain on you. But sometimes, I just have to go out of my comfort zone. Then you don't have to.

Comments

[Miss T]

I've yet to hear a positive comment about chicken feet. The rest looks great, though!

[Angela Nickerson]

When we lived in Minnesota, we used to joke about that restaurant's name, but somehow we never went to eat there. Now I am wishing we had. :)

[Dominique]

Thanks for the review about the chicken feet...I think :)

We're going to a Spanish restaurant in Cleveland for Thanksgiving dinner. We did this last year, and I ended up with a great garlic soup, paella and sangria for Thanksgiving dinner.
I love a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, but we most often go out of town because we can get a longer weekend over Thanksgiving, and we're usually itching to get out of town at that time of year anyway.