Seafood Palace

Tuesday, April 12, 2011 5 brave souls gathered at the Seafood Palace in Garden Grove on a Tuesday night for dinner. Tuesdays are off days for a lot of restaurants and the main chef's and staff have the day off. You take a chance of quality of food and service. But in exchange you get a small crowd and a lot less noise. Especially in the local Asian restaurants which are frequentted daily by the locals. We were assigned a very good server which was nice. Henry as usual did all the selection and ordering for us. Great that he reads, writes and speaks Chinese. Otherwise who knows what we would end up eating. As it is we have had sea slug and jelly fish with Henry. And both were decent. Seafood Palace is a Chinese restaurant with a Vietnamese twist. So a few more spicy components to the dishes and a heavier hand on the "peppers". Tonight we had several repeat dishes, Salt & Pepper Calamari, Shrimp with Broccoli, Beef with Spinach and the Sweet Sour Soup we had at the last dinner here. With the soup you could tell the difference in who was cooking in the kitchen. Tonight's soup was good but not the caliber as the dish we had last month. Something was not quite the same. The waitress brought us out a platter of Vietnamese sausages (on the house). The sausages were about the diameter of a quarter and sliced thin. You could taste the lemongrass in the sausages. Immediately you knew they were Vietnamese and not Chinese. Served the julienned cucumbers and peanuts. We had a dish that Henry called "Chow Mein" Chicken and vegetables on top of very thin slightly crispy noodles. We had something similar to this at Duong Son but I preferred the Seafood Palace version. A new item was a Spicy Fried Pork. Julienned strips of pork and vegetables. This was a very good dish. Spicy but not enough to kill your palate. I would have this dish again. Ted really enjoyed this one. We were served sliced oranges for dessert (Chinese are not into sweets) and then the waitress brought out a tray of Mango puddings for us. Compliments of the house. This is why Henry is so valuable. We would not get this if we went in on our own. Plus Henry is a great friend and good company. And he is a good dancer. A man of many talents. As always we had a wide assortment of wines. I did not get all the particulars written down as I was too busy eating and chattering away and forgot to make a list. 2007 Huber Chardonnay 2005 Sinor-LaValle Aubaine Vineyards Pinot Noir ???? Marsanney Burgundy 2005 McKeon Phillips BPR Pinot Noir ???? Ken Brown Santa Maria Pinot Noir