Go rice-less at Lotus Chinese Eatery

PHOTO by RICK POON

Portion your order just right at Lotus Chinese Eatery and your meal won’t contain a single grain of rice. The restaurant does serve the stubby little staple (steamed as a side, fried as an entrée), but rice, a near necessity of so many Chinese meals, is left at the end of the menu for a reason.

Overriding the typical culinary conventions is the fact that Lotus focuses on Chinese Islamic cuisine, a food cooked up by the minorities of northern and western China. There, the land is so arid that any hope for swampy stretches of rice paddies dried up long ago, forcing inhabitants to adapt to wheat instead, a dietary switch that mills the golden grain into everything from noodles to breads.

It’s those heavier specialties (noodles as wide as streamers, dense breads baked for each order) that help brand Lotus as a Chinese Islamic restaurant. But what might help even more is that Lotus’ lineage snakes its way back to restaurateur Jamillah Mas, as some of Lotus’ staff previously worked for the woman who imported Chinese Islamic cuisine to Orange County.

So it’s no surprise, then, that the most requisite dish at Lotus is its sesame bread. It takes about 20 minutes for the kitchen to ready an order, but when the bread ships out with slices spilling off the plate, you know the wait was worth it. The whole thing is still steaming from the oven. Every batch is afforded the option of having green onions kneaded into the dough (a must for more flavor), but the dominant ingredient is of course sesame seeds, which stud the top of the bread so that each slice seems as though it could sprout at any bite.

Excellent on its own, the bread is even better when soaked with the liquid leftovers of accompanying dishes, the best of which is the lamb with green onions. There’s no pork on Lotus’ menu (the restaurant adheres to Islam’s Halal standards), but the lamb puts any non-ruminating dreams out of mind. It’s sometimes hard to distinguish between the restaurant’s lamb dishes and some of the beefier plates, but the lamb with green onions is a striking exception, as every tender shred of meat is matched by a crisp cut of green onion. Even under its relatively heavy brown sauce, the lamb seems far leaner, too.

Although the sesame bread is a near-perfect pairing for Lotus’ lamb, nothing complements the rest of the menu better than the restaurant’s hand-cut noodles, thick sheets so wide and heavy they end up draped over your chopsticks like a beach towel slung over your shoulder.

Available in every noodle dish, the hand-cut noodles eat much differently than their machine-borne counterparts. They’re uneven in shape and size and therefore far doughier, making them easily able to fill you up all on their own. Lotus serves the noodles in recognizable fashion (lo meins, pan-fried dishes), but the more authentic options form around the noodle soups, which drop the fat things into hearty beef stews and the like.

On triple-digit days, the restaurant’s cold appetizers of spicy ox tripe and five-spice ox tendon do well, too, though they can easily slip a meal into a meat-heavy burden. To remedy that, there are the restaurant’s vegetarian dishes, most of which simply swap tofu into what once were meat-based recipes.

But even if you take things lightly at Lotus, there will be leftovers—noodles for days, bread for a week. And that’s a satisfying feeling as you walk past all those waiting for takeout, some already counting every carton to make sure there’s enough sweet and sour chicken and steamed rice to go around.

LOTUS CHINESE EATERY 16883 BEACH BLVD | HUNTINGTON BEACH 92647 | 714.848.4940 | OPEN SUN-THURS 11AM-3PM AND 4:30-9:30PM | FRI-SAT 11AM-3PM AND 4:30-10PM | FOOD FOR TWO $20-35

Tags: Food, halal, Huntington Beach, lotus chinese eatery, Restaurants