2014 Restaurant of the Year from Eater Boston
Boston Magazine's 50 Best Restaurants
Improper Bostonian's Best Dumplings
Eater's 38 Essential Boston Restaurants...
With those kind of accolades, and an interesting back story about 3 Chinese-American siblings opening up an food truck serving modern American Chinese cuisine, I expected this restaurant to knock my socks off.
Hmmm...not so much.
Yes, the locally sourced menu is a fairly tasty mix of drunk food (THE DOUBLE AWESOME: Two oozy eggs, VT cheddar, local greens pesto, ham sandwiched between fried scallion pancakes; $11) and super healthy vegan/vegetarian dishes (BEETS BY MEI: Chilled roasted beets, radish, wheat berries, mint, pepita seeds, maple soy; $5).
If I was still a college student, I'd probably be all over this.
However, while I would eat here again if I was in the neighborhood, nothing really excited me enough to rush back (also tried the Lemongrass-Pork Dumplings, Magical Kale Salad, and Summer Blush Sangria, all of which were a bit boring).
Oh, and the service model just plain annoys me! They have revamped to all-day counter service, so you get to:
1) Stand in the line snaking through the middle of the restaurant; 2) wait while the group of three clueless idiots in front of you fail to check out the menu until they are already standing at the cash register; 3) place your order and pay; 4) stand cluelessly in the middle of the restaurant waiting, or better yet, grab one of the relatively few tables before someone else does [no reservations except for parties of four or more, although annoyingly, a couple of two-tops still sported reserved signs, probably for the owner's friends; 5) wait for your name to be called out in the fairly loud space; 6) carry your own food back to your table on metal baking trays; 7) get your own silverware, plates and paper napkins; and 8) finally bus your own table.
really? Really?? REALLY???
When I go out for dinner on a Friday night, a CAFETERIA is not what I'm looking for.
'2014 Restaurant of the Year from Eater Boston'
'Boston Magazine's 50 Best Restaurants'
What was a young vibrant puppy in '14 is now a dog.
Couldn’t agree more. I was very disappointed when I went and couldn’t figure out where the accolades came from. Haven’t gone back.
Awards can be an albatross: check in with Tim Maslow and his four stars in the Globe for Ribelle, the resulting unrealistic expectations from which I believe played a part in that restaurant's failure. (Maslow is obviously a difficult character, and the restaurant was far too loud, but I think it deserved a better fate.) I'm part of the problem, helping anoint so-called winners every year in The Improper's Boston's Best issue.
That said, I like Mei Mei a lot: it's a standard in my pre-Sox rotation: vivid flavors, consistency in execution, some clever ideas, nice prices. It's a bunch of vegetarian-friendly small plates for three or four or five bucks, and some scallion-pancake sandwiches for around ten bucks. No award is going to make me look at that menu and expect transcendence. The question is always: is it good at what it's trying to do?
I often mock restaurants in my reviews for naming dishes "The Best Whatsis Evah", but I think that Mei Mei's Double Awesome sandwich is aptly named. The obvious, hype-resistant Chowhound thing to do, going back to Leff's original manifesto, is to ignore the accolades and judge it on your own terms. The good news is that doing so doesn't involve a huge capital outlay. If O Ya or Menton falls down on you, you have a right to be pissed. You can gamble on Mei Me for $20-$30..
I have not contributed to the considerable hype around it in my professional capacity -- the only recognition it has gotten in The Improper was a Best Food Truck award in 2017 (I think I nominated something else but liked that win enough not to object) -- but I keep going back to the brick-and-mortar spot for my own reasons. I think it's pretty damned fine for what it is. (For diners who care about such things, they have a fairer compensation model for employees than most. I try to support such places, but that doesn't influence my perception of the food,)
If there's two mistakes I keep making, one is negatively pre-judging based on shallow appearances, and the other is bringing inflated expectations based on someone else's opinions. I chide myself whenever I fall for either, which happens more often than I'd like. But resisting them in favor of measuring your own mileage is the Chowish thing to do. My favorites are chockful of superficially shitty-looking places, and places I forgave for not living up to other peoples' hype.
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