- Duck Happy Buns at Firefly in Addison.
There has been a long low buzz on Firefly in Addison. A old (and old) friend of mine has eaten there many times. He, we’ll call him Beric, and his lovely wife love the spicy edamame, Shaking Beef, and Lemongrass Chicken. So last night I grabbed Beric and a couple of other regular review buddies, including Evan Grant, and headed up to Firefly.
Monday night at 6:45p.m.: There was one table with two ladies enjoying a bottle of wine with their dinner and our four top. Perhaps most “normal” people were home in front of their TVs watching the Home Run Derby from the baseball All-Star activities in St. Louis. Beric and Evan are into baseball and they were way too happy to find a huge screen TV over the top of my head. Let’s just say that the dinner conversation that night was, well, stunted. (Why TVs in restaurants?)
- California, shrimp tempura, and tuna rolls at Firefly.
First platter up: Neon-colored plate of rolls, including spicy tuna, California, and shrimp tempura. Not a very adventurous order, I know, so it is no surprise that the rolls were nothing special. The spicy tuna was not spicy and was covered in a thick blob of red roe.
Second platters up: Spicy edamame and Duck Happy Buns. The edamame was spicy—the pods glistened with a glow of red hot Asian oil. As we slipped them through our teeth, the outer layer split into two mushy layers and jammed the soybeans and bean strings against the back of our teeth. Over boiled? Not sure, but not a pleasant experience. We had better luck with the happy buns, one of my favorite Chinese dishes. Sadly, they were cold, but the duck was warm and moist and the green onion was crunchy. (I haven’t found anyone in Dallas who can beat Yao Fuzi’s buns.)
- Lemongrass chicken.
Main platters: The menu at Firefly is an ambitious compilation of Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, and Italian. Perhaps they should knock a few cuisines off of their list and concentrate on two or three. The dishes we tried varied from pitiful to picture perfect. The chicken balls in the lemongrass chicken were dry and dissolved in my mouth like grainy pieces of particle board. I didn’t see any lemongrass, just huge squares of glassy red onions.
Yellow curry chicken would have been grand if the curry sauce filled with hunks of yam, potatoes, and carrots hadn’t been poured over the same dry chicken. The warm liquid would have been splendid over a pile of rice, but we hadn’t ordered any. The highly recommended Shaking Beef was better. However the cubed pieces of filet mignon marinated in yogurt and pan-seared with garlic, red onion, and green beans had the distinctive taste that comes from a poorly cleaned gas grill. Perhaps the marinade burned to the meat giving it a slight taste of resin.
- Udon noodle bowl.
The best entrée was the udon noodle bowl filled with strips of rib-eye sautéed in a sweet-ish soy glaze and tossed with crunchy carrots and green bell peppers, crisp broccoli, and oodles of shiitake mushroom slices. But we only found twelve long udon noodles in the whole bowl. Very strange.
The website describes the atmosphere as whimsical Art-Deco. I found no traces of either. By 8:00 p.m. we were the only people in the restaurant and there was no music to keep us company. They could have at least turned up the sound so we could hear the crack of Prince Fielder’s bat.
- Interior of Firefly.
