Dining Out
Karl
Wells
Stonehouse
8 Kenna's Hill
Ph. 753-2425
The last time I dined at the
Stonehouse - approximately 2 1/2 years ago - was just before it closed. The
room we dined in needed a paint job. It looked sad. The food was sad too, as
was the service.
It was clear that whatever
they made on my bill and the bill of the only other table occupied in the place
that Friday night wasn’t going to prevent the legs from coming out from
underneath the Stonehouse. This restaurant has struggled in recent years. In my
opinion the place hasn’t had the kind of personal attention paid to it by
management that’s really needed to make a go of it in a game famous for
creating failures. Restaurateurs must watch their operations like hawks if they
hope to make a go of it. If they don’t, doom, like the next mortgage or gas
payment, awaits.
I’m delighted to report that
the Stonehouse has re-opened. This time, it’s a Chinese eatery, a good one too.
The owner, Mark Ji, has imported a couple of cooks from China. The head chef is
Li Chang Chen. He hails from a place called Dalian, about 500 kilometres from
Beijing. Chen has 20 years of professional cooking experience.
According to our maitre`di,
Bin (that was his first and last name, Bin) the food at the Stonehouse is unlike
any other Chinese food in the city. That was a bit of a stretch. They do have a
few new dishes like scallion lamb and Coca Cola chicken wings, but there’s
plenty on their menu replicating what you’d find in several other Chinese
restaurants in St. John’s. For example, they have Kung pao chicken, sweet and
sour ribs, wonton soup and chicken fried rice.
The interior of the
Stonehouse, while basically unchanged, has been freshened with a lick of paint.
The pine flooring appears to have been polished and the tables sport new white
cloths with
red napkins, artistically stuffed into tall, stemmed water glasses. Each room – map, rose room and library – in the large house, has its own wallpaper, unique wall hangings and lamps.
While I searched in vain
trying to find my $20 reading glasses, fishing over and over in this and that
pocket, Bin went on and on about how all of the menu at the Stonehouse was
healthy food from northern China. It was properly sliced, he claimed, and not
deep-fried. He seemed especially proud of the chef with 20 years experience and
kept singing his praises.
Finally, I called off the
search for my glasses, deciding to throw caution to the wind and just let
chatty, gregarious Bin order for me. All I asked was that he bring us items that
were unlike anything we’d find in other Chinese restaurants in town.
The Stonehouse wonton soup
was beautifully made. First, the chicken broth in which the wontons were
submerged was fresh and had good chicken flavour. The broth also contained fine
shreds of chicken, and, floating on top, chopped scallions and slivers of egg
noodle. The wontons were filled with ground pork seasoned with salt and pepper.
However, these wontons also contained some leek as an additional ingredient.
That made the difference for me. The mild, yet distinctive flavour of leeks
gave the dish much more character than your run-of-the-mill wonton soup. Our
server, Bin, told us "people say the Stonehouse has the best wonton soup
in town." They may be right.
Bin had recommended a dish
called spidery sweet potatoes. He claimed there was no other restaurant in the
city serving such a dish. I’m sure that’s the case. However, other restaurants
might have decided that spidery sweet potatoes just weren’t worth the trouble.
Bite-sized chunks of fried sweet potato had been covered with a layer of melted
sugar. It’s the same stuff candy apples are dipped in to make their hard candy
coat. The potato is rushed to your table and you’re asked to eat it right away.
They bring a bowl of cold water because when you take a forkful of the
extremely hot sweet potato to your mouth, “spidery” threads of melted sugar
come along with it. To prevent a mess, you dip the potato into the cold water
and it severs the threads. The reason you’re required to consume this dish
right away will become obvious if you leave any of it. As the sugar cools it
hardens to the point where you have an inedible concrete mass on your plate. If
this dish had tasted delicious I might have overlooked the downside but its
taste was, I’m afraid, forgettable.
When our slightly spicy yu
Hsian pork arrived I briefly thought I was looking at a plateful of fresh
pasta.
The dish contained “pork
stir fried with green pepper, red pepper, green onion, agarics and black bean
sauce.” (Agarics, by the way, are mushrooms.) The reason the dish looked like
pasta was because of the way the pork had been cut. Thin sheets of pork had
been painstakingly cut, by hand, into dozens of narrow strips like meaty
noodles. This presentation, combined with the fast cooking, gave the dish
incredibly interesting texture. The “mouth feel” was sensational but so were
the mingling flavours: pork, sweet peppers, black bean and hot spice. I loved
this dish and would have been quite happy having nothing but this dish, along
with steamed rice and a cold bottle of lager.
Stonehouse’s sesame shrimp
made a fabulous presentation. Triangle shaped slices of orange had been fanned
around the border of an oval plate. A pile of shrimp, coated in a whitish sauce
and dusted with a few black sesames rested inside the first half of the oval.
At the end of the shrimp pile were oddly cut pieces of fresh tomato, made to
look like the tail of a fish. A red maraschino was placed in a forward position
on the shrimp to resemble an eye. The overall effect was quite dramatic. If you
squinted, the entire dish actually looked like an exotic fish. Basically, this
dish consisted of fried shrimp coated with miracle whip. The shrimp was resting
upon a few spoonfuls of “canned” fruit
cocktail. There was nothing about the sesame shrimp, save the knife work used
in the decoration of the dish, which required a lot of skill. Also, I felt the
shrimp had been neutralized by the application of too much miracle whip. That’s
all I could taste in this dish, even though I recognized the large shrimp had
been perfectly cooked.
In addition to the wonton
soup and yu Hsian pork I can highly recommend Stonehouse’s yong chow style
fried rice. It made an agreeable accompaniment to our meal. I appreciated the
fact that this particular rice dish contained zero soy sauce. Since some other
dishes had intense flavours I felt having rice with more laid-back taste
provided good balance. Yong chow style fried rice was not without some pleasant
aromas and flavours. Along with the fried rice the dish contained “ham, green
beans, carrot, egg and shrimp.”
Bin explained that in China
desserts don’t really exist. That’s why they only offer one at the Stonehouse,
a lemon tart. This single dessert is concession to the western palate. Unfortunately,
I didn’t get to taste it. They had run out. Perhaps the Stonehouse needs to
concede a little more on the dessert side to our western palates. That said, I
think they’re doing a better than average job on everything else.
Our meal for two at the
Stonehouse, including four glasses of wine and tip, cost $118.39.
The Stonehouse was not
wheelchair accessible and the noise level was low.
Best Points:
Good food and good presentation.
Areas for Improvement:
Ratings Category:
The Stonehouse gets 8
points out of 10.
7 points = satisfactory, 7.5 points = good, 8 points =
very good, 9 points = excellent, 10 points = perfection