Tuesday, June 28, 2011.
Hoshun Should Be A Good Place To Eat.
After over a year since my last time, I thought Hoshun was due for another visit. It's a handsome, large restaurant on St. Charles Avenue, across Terpsichore from Zea. It opened with a great deal of fanfare shortly after the hurricane. Not only were the premises striking, but the menu was one of the most comprehensive samplings of Asian food in town. It offers as much Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese cooking as Chinese. There's a full sushi bar. The china and silverware are heavy and beautiful. Food presentations are also eye candy.
But I've never had better than a routine dinner here. Other miscues made past visits memorable, but not in a good sense. The most maddening was my failure, in three consecutive tries, to persuade the servers to bring the several courses in succession, not simultaneously. In one meal, I had four dishes on the table at the same time, but only the one of me.
Today's visit began with my noting that they need to sweep their sidewalk more often. It improved with the help of a sharper waiter than I've had in the past. He was attentive enough to to warn me that I was ordering two large entrees, constituting too much food. After an appetizer. I didn't have to tell him twice that I wanted all this coursed out.
The first course was tuna tataki. That's a seared-at-the-edges piece of tuna sliced thinly and marinated briefly in ponzu sauce. It looked good, and the portion was much larger than I'm used to getting. But I kept waiting for the flavor to arrive. It never did. Oh, well. Nice and fresh, anyway.
The first of my two entrees was a large bowl of the Thai soup called tom kar gai, but with a few variations. The green curry, coconut milk, hot red pepper and vegetables were all in there, but so were thin noodles and chunks of eggplant. The latter pushed it in the direction of a Thai green curry entree. All of this is what I love. What I couldn't figure out was, where is the heightened flavor that this dish has always shown me? Something was missing, and I couldn't figure out what. Ginger? Stock? I kept eating and eating--more than I intended, my scalp getting steamy from the pepper. I never did dope it out.
The unexpected noodles in that soup threw my order off balance a little. The second entree was Singapore noodles with chicken. Once in the past--I can't remember where or when*--I enjoyed a platter of Singapore noodles so much that I order it whenever I see it on a menu. It's never been quite as good since, and it wasn't tonight. For starters, it was made with shrimp instead of chicken. There was a good bit of pork in it, too. The curry flavor was all but undetectable. In fact, the dish tasted more like pad Thai than anything else. I ate about a fifth of it and lost interest.
In other words, this beautiful restaurant needs a more finely-targeted sense of taste in the kitchen. The Pan-Asian menu is a good idea, but its aim can't be at everything between the bullseyes.
A tremendous thunderstorm blew through town while I had this dinner, so I took my good old time. Lightning was still blasting to the south as I headed north for home.
Hoshun. Lee Circle Area: 1601 St Charles Ave. 504-302-9716.
*If I were saying these words instead of writing them, at this point I would break out into the Rodgers and Hart song masterpiece "Where Or When," one of my favorite standards.
