Greenvale: Finger-licking good
Dungeness crab is stir-fried at Hunan Taste in Greenvale. (Feb. 22, 2011) Credit: Newsday / Erica Marcus
Tuesday night at Hunan Taste we went “off menu.” Since I recently returned from a vacation in Hong Kong, one of the restaurant’s owners, Calvin Hu, put together a menu inspired by that seafood-centric cuisine.
We started with a steamer full of head-on shrimp that had been crawling about in the restaurant’s tank until the steamer met the wok. Virtually all shrimp eaten in the U.S. is previously frozen and when you get your hands (as I literally and messily did) on some “live” shrimp, it’s something special.
Next up, this bruiser of a Dungeness crab, stir-fried with ginger, scallions and garlic all bound together with some scrambled egg. Another finger-licking triumph. Really, the utensil doesn’t exist that can work a crab as well as your fingers.
Last up, a perfect steamed black bass with a side of Chinese broccoli. Hunan Taste did something revolutionary with Chinese broccoli that I’d never seen before: the chef cut it into bite-sized pieces so that it could be easily eaten with chopsticks.
Hunan Taste is at 3 Northern Blvd., Greenvale, 516-621-6616.
