Go for the hot pot specials, the
incredible dumplings, the legendary sauted
Chinese eggplant - even the seafood dishes
are delicious - and everything is a
fraction of the price it deserves to be. Vegetarians will
find more to eat here than at any of our big-league
restaurants that cater to that crowd.
Andrew Zimmern -
Mpls St Paul Magazine
You've driven past it a thousand times;
you'd be forgiven if you thought it was a flower shop. This
unadorned restaurant, in a basement on Nicollet below the
flower shop, is simply the best Chinese in the Twin Cities.
The owners are a Taiwanese Buddhist couple (she cooks, he
serves) who dish up Taiwanese specialties alongside Chinese
standards. The 3-cup tofu is a heap of silken, garlicky
bites in tangy, toasty jackets, and the Vietnamese
lemongrass mock beef is a platter of chewy strips suffused
with bright lemony flavors - the best mock
anything we've ever tasted. Also excellent: potstickers
(vegetarian and non), the fresh, sprightly soybean paste
noodles with bok choy, and the spicy, pork-laden Mapo tofu.
For an authentic Taiwanese experience, ask for "hollow
vegetable" - it's a leafy green vegetable
served on the streets of Taipei whose Chinese name
translates literally as "open heart." (They don't always
have it, but it's worth a try - a more
delicious green is not to be found). The restaurant is
usually filled with Chinese expats, families, and grad
students, and as most entrees are under $10, you could eat
here every night. (Some do.) The restaurant has developed
an especially loyal following in the vegetarian and vegan
communities (vegetarian items are cooked in a separate
wok), and on busy nights, customers have been known to leap
from their seats to help take orders. Delicious.
Affordable. May Evergreen prosper!
Jessica Nordell -
City Pages (Best of Issue)
They have a great selection of vegan
items, including vegan egg rolls (indeed!), vegan wonton
soup, lots of mock meat dishes, and a number of vegetable,
tofu, noodle and wheat gluten selections.
The owners are incredibly nice, they go out of their way to
make sure you get what you want, and are more than happy to
accommodate special requests. On one past visit, one of our
party ordered a dish that came out too spicy for her. The
chef noticed that she wasn't really eating it, and insisted
on making her another dish.
The visit before that, they made everyone in our group a
special vegan "pearl (soy)milk bubble tea", which is tea
mixed with soy milk and then shaken so it has bubbles, and
then tapioca pearls are added.
Among the many delicious things on the menu which I would
recommend, some of the best are the vegetarian egg rolls,
the vegetarian chicken nuggets, tofu with mushrooms and soy
sauce, tofu with vegetables in spicy sauce, wheat gluten
with pickles, sesame paste noodles (no peanut better, just
sesame), wonton soup, noodles with vegetables and satay
sauce and Taiwanese style stir-fried noodles.
Dave Rolsky - Vegguide.org
There are dozens of good ethnic
restaurants on Eat Street, a 17-block stretch of Nicollet;
so how does Evergreen Taiwanese, a
little mom-and-pop joint in the basement of an office
building across town survive? Because
owners Connie and Frank Hwang (she cooks; he handles the
front) do everything right. Meals begin with cold plates
like seaweed with ginger and garlic or spicy peanut and
tofu-skin salad, progress to irresistibly juicy pork
dumplings, and go on to spicy lamb soup, rich with meat and
noodles to soak up the stock. Eggplant with basil, drunken
chicken simmered in wine and ginseng, Mandarin scallops,
Beijing-style soy bean paste noodles...Frank will try to
stop you from ordering too much, but there's really no
getting around it. (N.B.: Don't forget to look at the
blackboard menu - that's where some of
the best dishes are.)
Epicurious.com
Having lived in Taipei for four years, I
can attest to the authenticity of both the food and the
ambience. Taiwanese food is known for it's freshness, not
spice and Evergreen delivers on this. As for the ambience,
I spent many a meal in a fluorescent-lit basement
restaurant in Taipei where I enjoyed all sorts of Chinese
cuisine from Cantonese to Northern-style cooking, Sichuan
and Hunan to Shanghai and Taiwanese styles. Evergreen's
strength is its variety of traditional Taiwanese
specialties interlaced with dishes from the Mainland. If
you want authenticity, try Evergreen.
cymrotom - Citysearch.com
