The Gossiping Gourmet: Taste of Taiwan in an Irvine complex
Arbor Village, just off the 5 Freeway at Jeffrey Road in Irvine, is a treasure trove of Asian cuisine.
Restaurants abound and it is home to a large Asian supermarket with wonderful foods that are hard to find in your everyday market. Across the street is another minimall with several more Asian restaurants. Peking duck, Korean barbecue, sushi, dim sum, Thai, pho and many more make this a wonderful place to explore a variety of cuisines.
I had never tried the Taiwanese place called A&J Restaurant, and I was not really familiar with this cousin of Chinese food, but they are close cousins indeed since Taiwanese has many influences from the middle to southern provinces of mainland China.
The restaurant is casual with very little in the way of decor but still pleasant enough. The menu is long and the prices reasonable, but only cash is accepted. Noodle soups dominate the first section. The noodles are made in-house, and diners have a choice of thin or wide in the various dishes.
My companion and I were a bit overwhelmed by the selection of soups but decided on the shredded pork with mustard greens and noodles. In this instance, we ordered the wide noodles. We got a generous bowlful that could easily be a meal in itself. The excellent chicken broth was flavorful and the noodles chewy. A good amount of shredded pork and mustard greens completed the soup.
Other soup selections include Chinese-style fried pork chop noodle, spicy beef tendon Szechuan-style and wonton noodle.
Taiwanese pan-fried pork dumplings were shaped like thick cigars rather than the traditional dumpling shape, and they were really good. They came eight to an order, with a crispy exterior and a delicious filling of seasoned ground pork.
The few things we didn’t like were all dough-based. The pan-fried beef bun had a tasty filling of shredded beef, but the bun was doughy and seemed undercooked, as did the Chinese sesame biscuit with sliced pork. Good pork, doughy biscuit. The scallion pancake too was thick and greasy and had little scallion flavor.
We loved the spicy wontons served Szechuan-style in a bit of dark broth and with a hot red sauce that provided just the right amount of heat. But my favorite was the Chinese-style fried chicken on rice. The rice was delicious in itself with a hint of sweetness from a green, finely chopped sweet pickle relish. On top were pieces of crispy, fried boneless chicken that were moist and juicy. Radish strips and chopped romaine lettuce completed the dish.
We ordered a thousand-layer pancake to complement our last dish, thin rounds of very tasty beef over a bed of noodles resting in a delicious spicy sauce. This time, we selected the thin noodles, which we preferred to the thicker ones. The pancake was quite large and multilayered but rather dry and tasteless. Perhaps it’s meant to be used to sop up some juice or sauce.
A&J also features a Vegetarian Delight, which includes gluten puffs, fried bean curd and mushrooms.
Breakfast is served on the weekends from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. A nice selection ranges from Chinese churros to flaky green onion pastry, sweet rice balls and fried bean curd with bean vermicelli soup.
Takeout can be ordered online.
This is not fine dining, but the restaurant has some delicious food and a friendly staff. It is a nice place to start exploring the many culinary wonders of the vast array of Asian food that has come to Orange County.
TERRY MARKOWITZ was in the gourmet food and catering business for 20 years. She can be reached for comments or questions at m_markowitz@cox.net.
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A&J RESTAURANT
Where: 14805 Jeffrey Road, Suite D, Irvine
When: 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays
Prices: $1.95 to $8.95
Information: (949) 786-3585 or https://www.aj-restaurant.com