Do You Bumbu? Mai Place Maps Out Exotic Flavors

Mai Place's curious slogan is, "Restaurant Quality Without Reservation."

Perhaps there are times when the dining room is packed, but indeed a weeknight reservation in the spacious dining room looked hardly necessary. Are they insinuating their cuisine is better than home-cooked food, and worth ordering out?

With many exotic dishes on offer, I believe the answer is yes. 

Requisite Egg Foo Young, Sweet & Sour Chicken, and Chinese Broccoli Beef are all here, sandwiched between rarely available dishes such as Sizzling Swai Fillet, Enoki Mushrooms with Silken Tofu, Sea Cucumber, and Fok Kien Style Fried Rice.

Servers and kitchen staff alike are firm in their identity as a Chinese restaurant. "Cantonese, Mandarin" I was told over the phone in a thick accent. "Chinese!" asserted our waitress when I inquired about their recipes. Enter Fujian cuisine, one of China's most culturally and linguistically diverse regions. The menu manages to sneak in Indonesian jewels, and Southeast Asian-perfumed plates.

Kids can even get a "Shelly Temple" for $2.25. Mai Place has a little something for everyone, without giving up authentic dishes.

Our server pushed the Pineapple Chicken from the ‘specials’ board, which left us figuring out how much room we had on our table. Eight Jewels with Lotus Root ($9.95) proved bright with ginger, and unlike the vegetarian version, contained a full menagerie of seafood and meat. A parade of scallops and prawns, cross-hatched squid curls, dark swaths of barbecued duck, Chinese sausage, crisp sugar snap peas, crunchy lotus slices, carrots and onions indeed make for a treasure trove.

Mai's fusion seems to stem from a confluence of flavors combining Old Singapore meets Portuguese influence, which traveled by water to the Malacca Straits. An exotic dish that appears under the Chef's Specialties is Lamb Bumbu ($11.95), an Indonesian sauce of lemongrass, tamarind, galangal, cumin, turmeric, star anise, cardamom, coriander, ginger, shrimp paste and coconut milk that swaddles strips of lamb.

Our server was shocked that we wanted to order Bumbu, and said they almost took it off the menu except there's one customer who always orders it. When I inquired about the ingredients, and mentioned shrimp paste she shrieked, "Yes! Shrimp paste, how did you know? We make sauce here."

Continuing our odyssey, we ordered a plate of Mustard Greens with Bamboo Pitch ($8.95), a fascinating discovery (a mistranslation of Bamboo Pith?) Our server tried to explain this unusual ingredient, which is essentially a fungus that grows on the stems of bamboo, like a mushroom. Kind of an Asian Huitlacoche? But it's cream colored and spongy, yet yields a crunch — delicious and unusual.

The Mustard comes in large segments, like bok choy, and is braised in a mild broth. Aside from the unusual nature of the Pitch/Pith, it feels like this dish is meant to balance out more assertive flavors, in a yin yang sort of way.

This eating adventure ended with Taishanese Noodles with Chicken Sausage and Prawns ($8.95). Rice vermicelli is wok-tossed with five spice sausage, juicy prawns and commendably tender chicken — the curry-stained threads are a tangle containing bites of meat, bean sprouts, onion,  and red and green pepper curls.

If you want to be truly authentic, order the Mai Place Galangal Chicken (half $9.95, whole $17) steamed chicken that is sliced and served cold, as the family beside us did. As the temperature drops, I see a Mountain Lamb Hot Pot ($12.95) in my winter dining future...

Mai Place

3152 NE Sunset Blvd,
Renton, WA 98056-3337
Mon.-Sun. 11 a.m. - 10 p.m.

(425) 228-6388