For dinner last weekend we dropped in on an old friend. Not at any home. And this friend is not a person. A lot of our old friends are restaurants. And we view them as fondly. Our family has made many memories in restaurants throughout the years.
Trey Yuen in Mandeville has been around since 1984, but it didn’t become a big part of our life until we moved to the north shore. That was 1990, and at that time there weren’t nearly as many restaurants as there are now. Trey Yuen was more than a restaurant. It was an experience. Quite exotic visually, a lot of the interiors came from China, and it was designed to resemble a Chinese palace. The Koi ponds out front provided endless entertainment for the kids, especially if they got to throw out some fish food.
Going to Trey Yuen now conjures up a flood of such memories. Only one bad one, when Mary Ann jumped up to yank our one-year-old daughter from her high chair and Heimlich her as she turned blue. All our other memories are fun. It was here that Jude learned how much he loved potstickers, and as he grew, so did his orders. Four, I think, was his high mark.
Walking through the dining room last Saturday night I saw other families enjoying the Po-Po Platter as the table’s centerpiece. The name has been changed to the Trey Yuen Platter, probably because other families had as much fun with the name as we did. This thing is like having a campfire or a clambake at the table. It comes with a flame in the middle over Sterno, and tall skewers with a cherry already skewered, encouraging the roasting of things. Kids need no encouragement for this. After all the food was gone, Jude decided to just roast a skewer once. Only once. The smell of a woodfire was very embarrassing.
The purpose of this platter is not the campfire, but the food. All good, and great for keeping the troops at bay until entrees arrive. For about $22, there are 2 egg rolls, butterfly shrimp, barbecued pork, barbecued ribs, chicken wings, and fried wontons. Oh, the wontons. The Fitzmorris family has consumed an incalculable number of these over the years. Until ML moved to fried rice. Again, hard to imagine the amount of this we have enjoyed.
Until last Saturday, I was the only one who ever ate any “real” food at Trey Yuen. MA always stuck to her Mandarin Chicken, though, to her credit, she did veer away from this in later years. Jude ate potstickers, and enough of them at $1 apiece to really run up the bill, ML had her fried rice. I never knew what I would get when I went, and often times it wasn’t even on the menu. A Wong (there are five) always was and still is on the premises if they are open. And if Tommy or Frank was there, it was especially interesting. Frank, often regaled us with his tales of a recent visit to China (he goes often with the Yan Can Cook guy.) He comes back with fresh ideas and would whip something up for me. Always spectacular. He makes a Chinese gumbo that ought to be on the menu.
But if Frank wasn’t acting as my private chef, I made my way all around that menu. Great specials are always on the blackboard. Anything they do with steak is just great here. I first tried the Kew Steak from a special. Delicious cubed steak, sauteed in a wine sauce with mushrooms and snow peas and other Chinese vegetables. Even ML moved on to this in later years. My default dish here is Mu Sui Pork, which is julienned vegetables and cloud ear mushrooms in a hoisin sauce, served with 4 pancakes. Even MA likes this one.
The truth is that Trey Yuen serves a consistently great and very large menu of what MA likes to call “fake” (fill in the ethnic cuisine), meaning the basic of the exotic food styled for the American palate. The Wongs actually do offer the most authentic of this type of food. And it is delicious. MA will be the first to admit she doesn’t want to eat chicken feet.
What she did want to eat on Saturday, though, was something completely different than anything we had ever had here. We did have the Tong Cho duck once, and she loved it. Tong Cho is a sweet hot pepper sauce that is a signature of the restaurant. Thick and sticky, with a lot of complex flavors. Get this sauce on something. We got it on Wor Sue Opp, a duck dish that is a half-duck on the bone, deep-fried and served over shredded iceberg lettuce. And she ordered combination fried rice, for old time’s sake. I had my usual starter, hot and sour soup. It was not like it used to be, and that was disappointing. This was good too, but the other seemed better.
Generally, MA thinks the food was better back in the days when we went a lot. But we both agreed the duck we had Saturday was delicious. It left us thinking that maybe we should go back more often, break with our old traditions and start in on this massive menu’s less familiar dishes. I’m excited about this. My wife is ready to let the Wong’s do what they do best-bring unusual Asian flavors to great ingredients, turning out quite delicious dishes even she feels “safe” eating. Sign me up.
Trey Yuen Cuisine of China
600 N. Causeway Mandeville
985-626-4476
Mon-Th . Lunch 11-2 Dinner 5-9:30pm
Friday Lunch 11-2 Dinner till 10pm
Saturday Dinner 5-10pm
Sunday 11:30am-9:30pm
treyyuen.com
