[Disney California Adventure] The Lucky Fortune Cookery (nouvelle version)

Récemment, les restaurants The Lucky Fortune Cookery et Cocina Cucamonga Mexican Grill, ont échangés leurs emplacements. Débuts décevants, semble t'il, pour le premier...

THE UNLUCKY FORTUNE COOKERY
California Adventure opened its newest eatery on Friday, in the former location of Pacifc Wharf's Cocina Cucamonga. More accurately, the two restaurants switched places, but the process took months to complete, finally giving Cocina Cucamonga expanded options for its Mexican grill-style menu, and re-opening the Lucky Fortune Cookery after years of abandonment.


The Lucky Fortune Cookery's menu is pretty small, offering basic Asian rice bowls that guests can customize with their choice of protein and sauces.


The Disneyland press release explains the new menu:

Customize Your Asian Rice Bowl! Guests Select Ingredients at New Lucky Fortune Cookery in Disney’s California Adventure
The colorful new Lucky Fortune Cookery, debuting Friday, Sept. 4, 2009, is the newest addition to the variety of dining options at Disney’s California Adventure park. Located in the Pacific Wharf section of the park, Lucky Fortune Cookery offers guests the opportunity to create their own Asian Rice Bowl meals and enjoy them in an outdoor plaza.

• Lucky Fortune Cookery can be found in the location previously occupied by Cocina Cucamonga, which has relocated directly across the Pacific Wharf outdoor dining plaza
  
• The quick-service restaurant features colorful décor, paper lanterns, oversized pots filled with bamboo and iconic dragon designs.
  
• Guests are served at the quick-service windows of Lucky Fortune Cookery and they dine at tables under festive umbrellas in the outdoor plaza at Pacific Wharf. The environment allows for a pleasant and flavorful break in the day at Disneyland Resort.
  
• The Menu: Customized Asian Rice Bowls are the specialty of Lucky Fortune Cookery. It starts with a bowl of steamed white and brown rice and seared Asian vegetables. Guests select chicken, beef or tofu, plus a sauce of their choice: Mandarin orange, spicy Korean, Thai green curry or teriyaki.
  
• The spicy Korean sauce is actually based on an old family recipe provided by Gloria Tae, chef de cuisine at the award-winning Napa Rose restaurant in Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel & Spa. All the sauce options were researched and taste-tested by Disney chefs as well as by cast members from diverse cultural backgrounds so that the final products would appeal to the broad variety of guests dining at Lucky Fortune Cookery.
  
• The Price: Each customized Asian Rice Bowl, regardless of ingredients, will cost $9.49. A kid’s meal of teriyaki chicken and rice, including fruit cup and choice of beverage, is available for guests age 9 and under for $6.49.
  

Your Asian rice bowl is served in a take-out container, which is probably just a clever way to give you less food and keep packaging costs down at the same time. It's served with chopsticks and a fortune cookie.

Sauces can be ordered on the side, and you can ask to try more than one for no additional cost, although, it'll be interesting to see if that courtesy will last for long. The Mandarin Orange sauce was overwhelmingly orange in flavor, so much so that it was inedible. The Spicy Korean sauce tasted more like a typical teriyaki sauce than it did Korean BBQ and the term "spicy" is used very loosely here, as it was quite hard to discern much of a kick at all. The teriyaki sauce was bold in flavor, so much so that a few drops of water were needed to make it less overpowering. The Thai Coconut Curry sauce was the surprise hit of the meal. It was the most mild of the sauces, and agreed with the rest of the bowl's ingredients. The sauce was saltier than it probably should have been, but it was flavorful and rich without being terribly overpowering like the rest of the sauces. Still, the curry wasn't enough to save the meal.

The chicken was mostly flavorless thigh meat, and the portion of chicken wasn't enough for the amount of rice, nor justifiable with the bowl's $10 price tag.

The seared vegetables varied in their success. My bowl had more carrots than anything else, all of which were undercooked, but the bok choy and onions were overcooked and not worth eating.

Furthering the trend of inedible ingredients was the rice. Perhaps in an effort to give you a sense of increased value for an otherwise overpriced meal, the rice is a combination of steamed white and brown rices. No, you cannot get one or the other; your only option is to get the mixture, which is mostly white rice anyway. Either way, the rice isn't worth eating. I'm hoping it was a fluke, but the rice was incredibly overcooked, to the point of nearly unrecognizable mushiness. It's a mystery why it was allowed to be served at all.

So is the Lucky Fortune Cookery a viable dining option? I daresay it has the potential to be. The sauces need to be reworked, and the cooks need to work on serving properly cooked rice. It could also just be the luck of the draw that I visited at the the wrong time, after all, there are a couple MiceChatters giving the place favorable early reviews. For me, I'll give the place a couple months to get its act together before giving it a second try. If anything, the Thai coconut curry sauce is worth tasting again.

Spare Mad Tea Party lanterns decorate the area.


http://micechat.com/forums/blogs/dateline-disneyland/1232-dragon-finally-debuts-unlucky-fortune-cookery-california-adventure-work-more.html

Mouais, ça reste de la news mineure, les travaux ont pas du coûter cher!
Même si j'apprécie le fait de pouvoir manger asiatique dans ce parc, pas comme chez nous...

Le concept du plat customisé est quand même sympa.