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What I Ate: January 16, 2009 (In-N-Out; Merit Vegetarian)

Posted 17 January, 2009 at 1:57am by Michael Chu
(Filed under: Food, What I Ate)

Tina and I went to In-N-Out for lunch. I got a Double-Double, and we shared fries and a Coke.
In-N-Out Double Double and Fries

For dinner we went to Merit Vegetarian (548 Lawrence Expy, Sunnyvale, CA‎ - (408) 245-8988) which serves vegetarian Asian cuisine. We started with a Red Bean Smoothie (made with red mung beans, sugar, and sweetened condensed milk blended with ice) which was excellent. It was so good, in fact, that we ordered another one to go at the end of our meal.
Merit Vegetarian - Red Bean Smoothie

For an appetizer we ordered Fresh Spring Rolls, but they were out. So, I got the fried Imperial Rolls instead. The flavor was good, but Tina didn't like the texture of the inside (a little mushy and gritty).
Merit Vegetarian - Imperial Rolls

We had one of their specialty dishes: Sauteed Garlic Beef. The texture of the fried gluten approximated chicken better than beef and many of the pieces were too thin to be fried so long so they were hard through out. We were hoping that the "beef" would have been cooked with some sauce. (I understand that the frying is important for getting texture, but it would have been nice to actually have it sautéed after) Neither of us liked the dish to start with, but by the end of the meal I had grown to enjoy it and kept eating more and more of it. (The garlic flavor was great.)
Merit Vegetarian - Sauteed Garlic Beef

We also ordered Spicy Garlic Green Beans which had a great sweet and spicy sauce. One of the problems was that the sauce didn't coat the beans very well, so a lot of the beans weren't flavorful. We ended up taking a bite of the beans and then either using the bean curd in the dish or the rice to sop up some extra sauce to get some more flavor.
Merit Vegetarian - Spicy Green Beans

Special Rice Claypot was another specialty that they have that had a lot of flavor. It had tofu, soy "chicken", mushroom, bean thread, onion and ginger that we mixed into the rice. The rice is definitely something to order, but next time we'll try a different set of dishes.
Merit Vegetarian - Special Rice Claypot

2 comments to What I Ate: January 16, 2009 (In-N-Out; Merit Vegetarian)

Don, January 20th, 2009 at 1:51 pm:

  • It sounds like a very spicy and flavor meal. I'm a bit surprised at starting off with a sweet smoothie, though. Do you think it affected how you tasted the other dishes?

Michael Chu, January 20th, 2009 at 3:07 pm:

  • It might have had an impact - but we generally liked the flavors just not the textures of the dishes (chewy "beef", gummy insides of the rolls, sauce not coating beans)

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