Wu Liang Ye

The first time I went to Wu Liang Ye, my aunt from Taiwan took me there. Apparently my other aunt had spoken highly of the Chinese restaurant and since I don’t know that many Chinese restaurants in NYC, I figured it would be fun to try it out. The first Wu Liang Ye visit wasn’t bad (this was probably 2 years ago) but I remembered thinking it wasn’t anything special (and Grand Sichuan is a lot better). I ended up going to another Wu Liang Ye location (in midtown) with my mom and my aunt the other day and we were all REALLY disappointed with all of the food we ordered.

Originally, we were going to head to Pearl Oyster Bar, but I forgot my gift certificate so I decided I’d save a POB trip for another time. While we were heading to the subway, we came across Wu Liang Ye and since my mom and aunt both love Chinese food, we decided to stop in (the rain also helped us pick Wu Liang Ye). We sat down to the nearly empty restaurant and decided to order some dishes to share. We started out with thinly sliced pieces of pork with a spicy sauce:

The pork wasn’t spicy at all, in fact, it tasted like it was dipped in sugar. The majority of the dishes we had were sweet and not spicy (quite disappointing). My mom actually tried to tell the waiter that we weren’t happy with the dish, but the waiter insisted that we liked it (which is weird because we were the ones eating it, not him) and wouldn’t let us order anything else. We ended up leaving the dish uneaten.

My aunt is a fan of dan-dan noodles, so we got one order to share:

The noodles were a tad overcooked and the sauce had practically no flavor – not what my aunt was thinking of when she ordered the dish. The noodles were a let down, so we were kind of afraid of eating the other dishes we ordered.

We got an order of won-tons in hot sauce:

When I think of hot sauce, I don’t think of sugar. Do you? Apparently the people at Wu Liang Ye do because this dish was sweet and not tasty at all. My aunt asked for some hot sauce and once they came out with the hot oil with chili seeds, it tasted a little better. If you’d have the won tons with hot sauce at Grand Sichuan and you like them, you should just stick to those because you’d be seriously disappointed with the ones you order at Wu Liang Ye.

The last dish we ordered (the best out of the bunch) was sea cucumbers with hot sauce:

The only redeeming dish at Wu Liang Ye was the sea cucumbers, which were drenched in sauce and only tasted good because there was cilantro to mask the sauce.

I really dislike going to Chinese restaurants without my mom because my mom usually talks to the owners of the restaurant to find out what’s good on the menu and knows what to order, so I was initially kind of excited to eat at a Chinese restaurant with two experts. However, none of the dishes we ate were worth ordering again (or at all) and I think I could’ve gone to a Hot Wok, ordered chicken fried rice, and have been more satisfied than eating at Wu Liang Ye.