Stir Crazy
579 Congress St., Portland
871-1689 (p/f)
Due to an ownership and quality change at Portland Hunan, there is again a need for decent Chinese food in the Arts District. Stir Crazy fills that void quite nicely, though you first have to find the place behind a maze of scaffolding erected to repair the apartment building above it.
My dining companion and I had lunch at Stir Crazy recently. We began by sampling all three of the soup choices. The wantons in the wanton soup were limp and flavorless. The egg drop soup had a disquieting day-glo golden hue. The hot-and-sour soup got a lot of help from a tablespoon of soy sauce.
Not a great start, but the first entrée out was pork in black bean sauce ($5.75): incredibly tender pork enhanced with salty, fermented black beans perfectly matched to a slightly sweet brown sauce.
This dish and the two others we ordered were accompanied by highly recommended Crab Rangoon ($4.95 for six as a stand-alone appetizer; included that day as part of the lunch special). They were huge, crispy and delicious – worth a visit in and of themselves.
Next up was shrimp with Szechuan sauce ($5.75): big, tasty, perfectly wokked shrimp in a not-too-spicy sauce. As was the case with all three entrees, the vegetables included zucchini, snow peas, mushrooms, peppers, baby corn and carrots. Each vegetable was cooked to its individual perfection: the zucchini tender enough, the snow peas crispy enough, etc.
Chicken curry in coconut sauce ($5.75) was good, though I would have appreciated more variety in the vegetable selection by this point. This Chinese-style curry calls for lots of sautéed onions, and none were found. The chicken was also strangely textured, almost too tender, like the texture of scrambled eggs. It was hard to tell it was really poultry.
With the exception of the soups (stick with the hot-and-sour), this was a really good lunch. Tell your friends, because chances are they’ve gone right past the scaffold barricade and missed the gem awaiting behind it.
— Mort Viande
Stir Crazy is open Sun. through Thurs. from 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m. (call to double check on Sundays, as it was closed on a recent Sunday afternoon), Fri. and Sat. from 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.
