Zen Winners Dinners

Zen Win House

100 Parnell St

Dublin

1

01 8782888

A full weekend of work and socialising was punctuated by another trip down

Chinatown

to try out another of the new eateries on the block. My friend, a hungry German who loves her grub joined me on my search for a really good, really cheap Chinese restaurant. Our criteria was simple, if it was busy, we were going in. The fullest place on the street was Zen Win House and when we squeezed in the door the clientele, who were all of Chinese or Korean origin stared at us as if we just fell out of a spaceship. That’s a good sign I thought, and we had to wait for a table so they were fully booked. That gave me a chance to see what everyone was eating. Most were slurping at big bowls and dipping in huge sticks of deep-fried dough, the kind I’d only ever had in soup kitchens in

Vietnam

. I was excited, this was the real thing. Diners made trips to a little buffet table where they stocked up on salads and garnishes. The tubs on the table had a lovely crunchy celery salad with peanuts, Tofu noodles in chilli, horseradish salad and others I couldn’t identify.

We were given the standard European menu but I asked for what everyone else was having. They were having Chinese breakfast, so that’s what we were having too.I ordered Rice Gruel soup, (no prizes for writing snappy menus here), the German went for tofu soup. We asked for dough sticks and some dumplings and the waitress told us to stop ordering, that we had enough. We were immediately given knives and forks but of course I wanted chopsticks. We piled our side plates with the goodies from the buffet table. The salads were excellent and fresh and crunchy. Chinese food, as we know it can be laden with salt, sugar and corn-flour and leave you feeling less that lively. The Mandarin tea eggs, that’s eggs hard boiled in  tea, were tasty and their marbled terracotta colour looks so good when you peel them.

The banquet arrived. My soup was exactly what it said on the tin, rice gruel with pork and egg. I couldn’t eat it, it was like baby food. There was nothing wrong with it, I’m just not used to those textures. The German’s tofu soup was fine and great for dipping the delicious dough sticks into. The dumplings were plentiful, 20 on the plate. We had bowls of soy and chilli to dip things into. With 4 cups of Green tea and endless salads the bill came to €21.00. I am going back to Zen Win for dinner to get a better idea of the food, if the duck is good I’m hooked.

On another note congratulations to Kieran Murphy from Ice Cream Ireland for bagging two awards at the Irish Blog Awards at the

Alexander

Hotel

on Saturday night. I met Kieran and his lovely Mum out in the cold, watching the eclipse. Hats off to the lovely girls from Beaut.ie who also won two awards. It was great to meet all the mysterious bloggers from around the country. We ended the night on the tiny dance-floor at the Howl at the Moon on

Mount Street

,and as much as I asked the teccy bloggers, I still don’t know what a feed is……

Comments

[Tom Raftery]

Hey Val,

I really enjoyed meeting you at the Awards and apologies for my inability to explain feeds to you!

The feed for this blog is http://www.valskitchen.com/vals_kitchen/rss.xml

I have entered that in my feed reader, so now I will get an automatic notification every time you publish a new article.

"Yuan me baby" - I love it!