@hambaobao is no more, but save your tears, they’ve simply rebranded as @lils.taproom. Now they do a lot more than burgers, but you know they gotta keep a couple of burgers around since that was their original claim to fame. We started our beer & munchies dinner out with a tale of two potatoes: a Mont Blanc Café Noir Miso Roasted Japanese Sweet Potato Salad (good god that was a mouthful & a half), and a Rich A$ian. All dishes here cost eighteen bucks each, $17 each when you order three, and $16 each when you order five. All prices are before an extra 10% service charge, and there’s no government thef-sorry, taxation here.⠀
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While the sweet potato salad was muted, the Rich A$ian was fabulously flashy. These thick, homemade hand cut fries were deep fried to perfection and doused in a meat sauce that gave ‘zha jiang mian’, Lao Gan Ma, and most regrettably, a mound of trash leaves (coriander). The hand cut fries were stunningly stellar, and they were the quintessential French fries: a fluffy, soft interior coated in a remarkably crisp exterior that stayed crisp for an astonishingly long time. As for the meat sauce, it was scrumptious, but the textural differences between bits of minced meat were too drastic. I fully appreciate the concept of having larger & smaller bits of meat for textural variation, but it would work better if the size difference wasn’t as drastic.⠀
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Still, Lil’s is a piquant playground of flavours, and their tasty new dishes are very innovative. Thanks for the invite, @lils.taproom!