Dining out: May Keen Asian Cuisine

Last week marked the second time I have reviewed a restaurant in a space formerly occupied by another restaurant that I had also reviewed (stay with me on this one).

That is to say, this is a review of May Keen Asian Cuisine, which has been open for the past three months in the strip-mall corner occupied for a short time last year by Mashita Korean Bar-B-Q. It's across the street from epic, an upscale-casual American place housed in a building that used to be the site of La Terrazza — and I reviewed (and liked) both of those places.

I miss Mashita's barbecue and its little sides of cool potatoes and shredded pickled radishes, but I'm happy to say that May Keen is a worthy successor, with a good Chinese menu of American favorites and Hong Kong-style dishes. Many diners will find an adventure.

I hope May Keen survives. It deserves to do so not just because of its food but because of the owners' anxiously good service. This is a family-run place, so we just ordered a mess of food and ate it as it arrived piping-hot from the kitchen.

After seating us, and as we looked over the menu, our server brought a bowl of crispy-fried wonton strips to munch on, with a dish of duck sauce. We had two appetizers, fried cream-cheese wontons (a favorite with our kids, done well here) and the pan-fried dumplings, beautifully folded plump pastries seared crisp on one side and filled with deeply flavored ground pork.

Then we tucked into a bountiful serving of ham-fried rice. May Keen's menu states that the cooks try to bring freshness and quality ingredients to Chinese cooking, and that showed here, in a dish chock-full of savory ham, carrots, peas, onions, bamboo shoots, celery and water chestnuts. The rice was tender and well-seasoned, and would have tasted fine on its own. With all those fixings, it was a delight.

The lemon/pineapple chicken arrived next and lived up to the ham-fried rice, with slices of moist chicken with a crispy-battered coating, ladled with a judicious amount of delicious, tangy-sour sauce with bits of geleed golden fruit.

The one misstep of the night came next. The beef with broccoli had an excellent sauce, dark and smoky with a strong, garlicky finish, and its broccoli was excellently cooked. But the beef had an unpleasant, mushy texture, a surprise considering the quality of May Keen's other dishes. My youngest daughter and I picked out all the broccoli so we could enjoy the sauce.