Lucky Yee review - Hot Pepper Chicken and Northstar Cafe - turkey and sweet potato hash

So here's my first review of a restaurant, might as make it a two-fer.  First, lets tackle Lucky Yee chinese restaurant in New Albany, OH.  We frequent this take out location quite often.  Usually, I order the General Tso's, but today I decided to go with something different.  I ordered the Hot Pepper Chicken.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take the picture on the day we ordered it.  This is my creation of the leftovers.  The dish is slices of chicken with julienne carrots and celery, green onions, jalapenos, ginger, and garlic served in a hot pepper sauce over a bed of rice (hopefully I didn't forget any ingredients here).

So all in all, a fairly good dish.  It was slightly spicy with a good hint of ginger.  Like many chinese sauces though, I thought this one was too runny.  A little more corn starch could help to thicken that sauce.  The chicken was tender the first day but pretty dry when reheated.  I'm usually a big fan of anything with jalapenos, but here I didn't really like the sliced jalapenos.  They just provide more spice and you don't really get any jalapeno flavor as the other ingredients over power them.  I think making more a red chili sauce and eliminating the jalapeno would work great.  The garlic was in fairly thick slices.  I'd like to see some minced garlic here to provide a little more garlic punch.

In the end, I'd say it was an above average chinese take-out meal.  On a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best ever.  I'd say this was about a 7.

Come back later to see my recreation of this meal to see if it is worth ordering it or if you should make it yourself.


Next up, the turkey and sweet potato hash at Northstar Cafe at Easton in Columbus, OH.

This is a fairly simple recipe I think.  It just slices of turkey, sweet potatoes, red peppers, onions, green onion, and its supposed to come with two eggs but I subbed sausage (I think that's all anyway).  

The potatoes are sauteed and the onions are slightly caramelized.  This is very filling and it will hard to even finish it.  The dish is very plain to me.  While I imagine some that is due to the missing egg, but still there should be some other flavor around.  The onions and red peppers are so small that you hardly notice they are there.  I'd like to see a bigger influence of the caramelized onion and I'd like fire-roasted red peppers in some bigger chunks versus the very tiny sauteed red peppers.  The turkey is pretty much just thick sliced turkey lunch meat.  I'd suggest getting chunks of turkey meat similar in shape to the potatoes.  Not mention, maybe the turkey could be smoked (maybe it already is but I didn't taste it).  

Again, tune in later to see if my recreation will outshine Northstar's version.