Chopsticks at dawn: Ming Cafe, Buffalo

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The pork dumplings were tender-skinned and flavored with chives.

Perhaps it is the lack of high-quality Chinese dining options in Western New York that makes the arguments over Chinese food so vehement. My homey favorite is a slop pit to you. What you hold forth as the best lo mein in these parts, I will castigate as oil-soaked spaghetti with canned vegetables.

What’s really fueling to the chopsticks-at-dawn bitterness isn’t the arguer, of course. It’s naked wok envy, the unrequited yearning for the Chinatowns of our dreams, where every undistinguished hole-in-the-wall seems to serve up char siu, soup dumplings and stir-fried greens that would best anything we can reach for lunch.

A couple of months ago, one of those arguments resulted in a lunch date at Ming Cafe (3268 Main St., 716-833-6988 ) for a foursome of Chinese food fans. We were there primarily to test the restaurant’s reputation for some of the best Chinese food in town, albeit at higher prices than the storefront chop suey counters.

We figured the best way to settle the dispute was around a table. In retrospect, this was a cheerfully ignorant idea.

No one complained about the scallions or the wontons, but it was downhill from there.

The controversy started with the first dish, a bowl of wonton soup. It was murky instead of clear, and along with three plump wontons, noodles reclined in the broth. Three of four eaters found it adequate. Matthew, the wonton soup nut, pronounced it “dreadful,” noting that the broth was thickened, possibly by the extra noodles.

Note the dried chile peppers peeking out at top, a sign of the heat to come.

The spicy salt crispy calamari was my idea, a dish I’d had before and prompted my desire to revisit Ming. While the crispiness and the spice level was there this time around, so was something else – a decided fishiness in some of the calamari bites. I ate my share, but Matthew denounced the dish’s “off taste.”

A beef noodle dish was decent but boring, leaving use fishing through the noodles looking for slices of beef.

Hot, crispy, salty – chicken done right.

The Szechuan chicken won plaudits all around. All that was left on that plate was the dried chiles.

A dish of mu shu chicken was declared Chinatown-competent, high praise indeed from these eaters.

But the real consensus favorite was the crispy tofu dish, mo po tofu. Slabs of pleasantly chewy tofu in a piquant sauce with lotus root and other vegetables, it was a surprise hit.

But the hits came at a price – $15 for the mu shu chicken, $13.50 for the tofu dish. Including a pot of tea, the lunch came to nearly $100, including tip.

Lauren noted that the flavor of scallions and ginger came through in the dishes, “fresher,” more flavorful specimens of familiar dishes. Doug enjoyed the mu shu he ordered, too.

In fact, everyone agreed we’d enjoyed some excellent dishes, though not everyone agreed on which dishes failed. One thing was unanimous: The price tag was enough to make us think twice about making Ming Cafe a habit.

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Filed under beef, pork, restaurants, vegetables