May Garden (Santa Ana)

Once upon a time my dad had a lot of friends who lived in San Diego and Orange County. They loved a restaurant in Newport Beach named Tsuru, who boasted a talented Taiwanese chef named Eric. Even though Tsuru served mostly sushi to the surfer crowd, Eric could be counted on to whip up a Taiwanese banquet on any given weekend. The food was so good that despite the drive, my parents would never pass up an invitation to eat there with their friends. It was also one of the few places my sisters and I would readily go, even though we normally hated going out to eat with a bunch of grownups.

Sadly, the restaurant closed down and we lost track of Eric: until recently! He's opened up a restaurant named May Garden in Santa Ana. The place is the opposite of fancy, but the food is incredible. Caveat: the normal menu is very Westernized and not at all exciting. If you want good food, you have to call ahead and specifically request a Taiwanese banquet for a table of 10. Talk to Chef Eric or his wife, or e-mail me if you have questions. Since Eric remembered my dad, we also probably got special treatment and pricing. So I won't say how much the below cost, but even at double what we were charged this meal would have been well worth it.

May Garden
1400 Southeast Bristol Street
Santa Ana, CA
714-751-9229

Kaoliang (sorghum) wine. This particular bottle is 25 years old. Yes, my dad brought out the big guns. The wine was so fragrant the smell had infused the entire dining room by the end of dinner. It's hard to describe what it tasted like; unlike the usual young rubbing alcohol kaoliang, this bottle tastes sweet and smooth. A great example of why alcohol should be aged.

Cold plate: squid wrapped around seaweed, wrapped around masago; and lightly marinated steamed chicken. The squid dish was quite good. Perfectly tender with an interesting texture combination.

Lobster in butter and garlic cream sauce. This was definitely the least Chinese dish of the dinner. In fact, it tasted positively Italian. Delicious, but heavy.

Hard to find dish!!! Mixed seafood rolled in seaweed and lightly batter fried, with little balls of fried taro on the side. This is just down home tasty fried food.

Hard to find dish!!! Buddha Jumped Over the Wall is so named because the scent of it is so delicious that legend has it monks would climb over monastery walls to get a bite. Ingredients vary from restaurant to restaurant, but usually include quail eggs, taro, abalone, shark's fin, sea cucumber, water chestnuts, gojiberries, a good free range chicken, pork bones, and more.

Miso Chilean sea bass. Okay, I know we're not supposed to eat Chilean sea bass, but it was a set menu and it came out! Sorry, fishies. I have to also say, this was the biggest slab of Chilean sea bass I've ever seen. It was well over a foot in diameter.

Crab over sticky rice. Traditionally, a crab with a lot of eggs and very little meat is used so that the eggs can be mixed with the rice. There are mushrooms, meat, water chestnuts, and a few other goodies in the rice.

Lobster noodles. They took the butter garlic sauce from the earlier lobster dish and cooked it into a noodle soup. Extremely hearty, and served in the giant orange bowl below. It was delicious, but I think this would have been better packed away and saved for another day. Half of it went to waste, which is really sad.

We had to be talked into this dish, but only because we were already so full! The waitress said if we didn't eat some the chef was going to pack some up and make us take it home anyway, so how could we refuse? Stir fried rice stick noodles is a Taiwanese classic (and incidentally something my mom's really great at making).

Last, but certainly not least, fresh water-cooked mochi in crushed peanuts and sugar. So perfect! I only wish I'd had room for more than one. Gooey, warm, sweet, and covered in perfectly toasted peanuts.

I also brought a small Paradise Cake from King's Hawaiian, and everyone liked it! I think we have a wedding cake winner.