SHUN LEE. The enigmatic sign on 65th just east of Broadway looks transplanted from some suburban corporate park – all caps, block letters, betraying nothing about the goings-on inside. For years I wondered what Shun Lee was all about. Hair salon, life-extending clinic, and Shaolin temple were my best guesses, until someone eventually told me that it was actually a pricey Chinese restaurant. I dropped in for lunch today to tamp down the last remnants of my recent Chinese food craving.
What an odd odd restaurant. After you walk in the door, sunlight is a distant memory. Shun Lee is all black lacquer walls and no windows. There’s a bar on your left as you head towards the dining room. A bartender was polishing glasses with a towel under the watchful gaze of some creepy, red-eyed monkeys overhead. Made me think of the Long Island strip mall Chinese restaurants of my youth, dark, deserted places with cheesy dragon-themed decor and shady characters at the bar. Who the hell drinks at a Chinese restaurant bar, anyway? People up to no good, that’s who. The central section of the dining room is sunken, which struck me as preciously 70s. At night, I imagined the waiters walking off with the tables, a disco ball descending from the ceiling, and tubby, polyester-clad customers doing the hustle.
The a la carte lunch menu was pretty spare, perhaps half a dozen unexciting entrees per category. Very expensive. Prix fixe was $24.08 (kind of a strange, discomforting price, no?) for soup or appetizer, main course, and dessert. No thank you. We ordered the Szechuan dumplings in hot sauce appetizer, Szechuan crispy duck with scallion pancake, and Moo Shun pork with Chinese crepes. The dumplings were tender and satisfying with a memorable sauce, which tasted like soy sauce infused with chili oil. The duck was not bad, but could have been served a little hotter. The impressive layer of fat just under the crispy skin added flavor to the earthy duck meat, but this could have been even better had the fat been a little melted. The Moo Shun pork was tasty and gone in a flash, but didn’t elevate my moo shu pork consciousness. Shun Lee proudly bills itself as “haute Chinese cuisine” – yeah… no.
