Lunch in Chinatown and Sunday Gravy

My wife and I ate a whole lot of Chinese food when we lived in Philadelphia’s Chinatown between 2004 and 2012. One restaurant that opened perhaps a couple years before we moved to the suburbs and quickly fell into our dining rotation was M Kee, which specializes in both Hong Kong style barbecued meats and noodle dishes.

I’d been meaning to revisit them for a fairly long time and it finally happened when I met my mother there for lunch recently. Arriving a little early gave me time to admire the ducks hanging in the restaurant’s front window. As a general rule, I tend to like Chinese restaurants that hang up duck, pork and other meats for display to entice passers by.

M Kee sits next to the same intersection that is home to a pair of my favorite old-school Cantonese restaurants – Ho Sai Gai, which was the subject of my last post on a Philadelphia Chinese restaurant in late August, and David’s Mai Lai Wah. I’ve bemoaned the latter’s failure to bring back dine-in service after the pandemic but was pleasantly surprised to read recently that they’ve spruced the place up and re-opened for full service. They aren’t open for lunch, but I’ll be posting on them at some point when I can manage to get there in the evening.

The menu at M Kee is extremely large, but I had some idea of what I wanted to order before arriving.

A dish that I first discovered at M Kee and would usually ordered when we dined there was shrimp with scrambled eggs. In addition to that, I wanted to get some barbecued meat and requested an order of roast pork as well as my usual egg roll.

My mother was in the mood for both noodles and duck and ordered, naturally enough, roast duck noodles, which came with thin egg noodles.

She enjoyed the noodles and greens that accompanied them but said the duck was mostly fat and bones without much meat. I’ve run into that issue at other places in Chinatown. It’s one of the reasons I generally order pork instead.

The egg roll had a perfectly fried crust, but I couldn’t detect any of the pieces of barbecued pork I like to see in the filling. It was enjoyable nonetheless.

Of course, I had my fair share of barbecued pork once the order of it was dropped off at our table. It was sliced a bit thinner than I generally recall from eating so much of it during my Chinatown years, but the wonderful and slightly sweet flavor that I love so much was there.

The shrimp with scrambled eggs was the last dish to arrive. While I ate all of it, both the presentation and taste were a little off from what I recalled, and not for the better. It could have perhaps used a touch more sesame oil.

I actually think the version that I made at home a few years ago was better.

Still, it was a nice change of pace for lunch. I just think I’ll probably go in a different direction if I return to M Kee – perhaps something with noodles, along with more barbecued meat.

On our way to the train station to head home, my mother and I stopped in the Reading Terminal Market and grabbed dessert in the form of my favorite chocolate chip cookies; from Famous 4th Street Cookie Company. I had one with walnuts and it was as good as ever.

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The changeover from summer to fall generally marks the beginning of another Sunday gravy making season. And it got off to a strong start this past week, when I prepared a batch of it with beef short ribs and hot Italian sausage.

I’ve already posted in depth on how to prepare this dish here, so I won’t go into further detail. But here are the photos from the preparation of my latest batch of gravy.

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I’ll be back next week with a report on my findings following visits to three of Philadelphia’s most acclaimed pizza slice shops, all of which are within blocks of each other.