Sunday Bistro

The 4 stars are mostly for their wonton noodle soup. The other Chinese dishes I’ve tried here are good too. I never go for the Western style dishes in Hong Kong type cafes.

It’s a miracle, at long last, after a long search, I have finally found it again. The real, well made Cantonese wonton noodle soup.

Of course I would have found this earlier if I had tried it, since I’ve been here a few times. But I was too depressed about ever finding a good wonton noodle soup again to think it possible, and didn’t bother to try. Until one day, my mom said, it’s good here.

There used to be a small restaurant on the ground level of the plaza in Chinatown where Ocean is, right next to the Ocean take out. They made the best wonton noodle soup ever. That restaurant closed many years ago, and I have been searching ever since.

Don’t give me that Northern style wannabe wonton noodle, with the thick skin and fat noodle, bleh. The real deal is Cantonese, with thin noodles, thin wonton skins, clear soup, and the wonton filling is never mushy.

The noodles should be just dipped in rapidly boiling water for less than a minute, the wonton filling should have a lot of shrimp and a “fresh” mouthfeel, no mush. And a certain savory flavor, hard to explain but I know it when I taste it. They’ve got it all here. Now all they need to do is make those wontons a bit smaller, and give you an extra couple of them. Then it might just be close to perfect.

I didn’t like them at all when they were Sunday Cafe in Monterey Park, but the change in venue and menu and apparently, cooks, were definitely moves in the right direction.