Steamy Piggy (Kearney Mesa)

Is Steamy Piggy just a cute name, or a restaurant with real staying power?

We took advantage of happy hour pricing to try their appetizers. Salt and pepper chicken, crispy and salty:

3 cup chicken – super tender stewed chicken in a shoyu/sesame oil sauce. Tastes just like Japanese shoyu chicken to me, a true home cooking dish! Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Spicy wontons – not in pure oil as we expected but an oily broth. An outstanding fresh wonton wrapper and generous filling. And we ended up using this as a dipping sauce for everything else! My favorite.

Scallion pancake. Tasted a little like mashed potato. Not the best.

Pork butt bun. I’m not a big fan of pork butt but the flavors were good.

Rainbow dumplings – one each of cabbage, veggie, shrimp, chive, and curry chicken. Huge, a little greasy. The only one we didn’t like was the veggie.

The best dish by far, Beef Chow Fun. Amazingly tender beef, delicious sauce, nothing like we’ve ever tasted before. Mr A could not stop raving about it.

Last but not least, the Honey Milk tea. Kudos to them for using real brewed tea, not tea powder.

I liked this place a lot and I’m not sure why the Google rating was relatively low. We’ve already found our favorites – curry chicken dumpling, beef chow fun, spicy wontons, salt/pepper chicken – so we’ll be back!