Spring World
2109 S. China Place, Chicago, Illinois; Phone 312-326-9966
Date of Review: February, 2009
Specializing in Yunnan cuisine, Spring World is one of the few restaurants anywhere that focuses on cuisine from this region of China. Located in the middle of S China Place (in Chinatown), Spring World is an interesting place to locate. First of all, it was 1 degree Celsius with snow covering the ground so we were trying to locate a warm inside as quickly as possible. Secondly, I have never been to the interior of China Place which is a cross between New Orleans style building with stores and restaurants on the 2nd floor and an outdoor mall. Come to think of it, it reminds me a bit of some open air “places” I encountered in Singapore
The atmosphere in Spring World is pretty basic. It is about a 40 seat restaurant with mostly basic surroundings and 4 seat tables. It is clean, well lit and features prominently a TV that has the news being blurted out in Chinese.
We were having dinner and I already had an idea for some of the dishes I wanted to try based on my research of the restaurant and Yunnan cuisine. A nice start to the meal is a complimentary dish of 2 different types of cabbage and some peanuts. The cabbages were kimchi like with a different, but nice combination of spices. We started with the hot and sour soup. They give you a pretty large bowl for $1.95 and the flavor was quite good. It had a nice spice mix and the scallions gave it a nice flavor. This is a solid rendition of this dish. We decided to order 3 different dishes and sample them all. The best of the dishes we sampled was the stir fried chicken with rice cake. This dish featured small rice cake chunks that were the size of miniature tater tots. They were soft like a pillow and melted in your mouth like gnocchi. The spice mixture of red and green chiles, chicken, chunks of fresh ginger and garlic and lots of black pepper was a beautiful explosion of flavors in my mouth. It was bit greasy and that is the only thing that stopped me from eating everything on the plate. The colorful (lots of green scallions) spicy baby chicken was a little tame compared to the chicken with rice cake dish but it was still solid. There was loads of ginger, chicken, garlic and chili and I could pick up a slight taste off some rice wine vinegar which could have been a bit less prominent. The last dish we tried was the spicy shrimp. This dish featured a mountain of lightly fried shrimp speckled with red pepper. It was cooked with scallions and red pepper. It was decent, but just OK compared to the other 2 dishes. On another, visit I came for lunch and had the kung pao chicken. Interestingly, the complimentary cabbages weren’t offered with lunch. This dish had chunks of fresh ginger in the dish, but it lacked the spiciness that I had hoped it would offer. There were plenty of red chilis but I needed to actually bite into them to get to something spicy. The portions are large and my favorite thing about Spring World is the fact that all dishes are made to order so the food comes out fresh, hot and quickly. The bad thing is that the food is pretty greasy. It is not all that healthy as everything that I have tried is stir fried in a fair bit of oil. There are many other healthier options on the menu that we didn’t opt for including many Yunnan mushroom dishes and the hot pot which features meat and vegetables that you cook in huge pot of broth on your table.
On one visit, our total bill came to $39 for 1 bowl of soup and 3 entrees. We had water and tea is included. This is a good value for the quantity and quality of the food which is solid and probably one of the better options for a meal in Chinatown. This restaurant is also BYOB.
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