Today I ate lunch with a friend at Henry’s Hunan on Natoma St. In the 3 years that I’ve been working in this neighborhood I have never once had lunch at this place, so I was excited to try it out for the first time. You would never guess from walking down the street that Henry’s is good place to have lunch – it’s like, unless you know it’s there, you could walk past it a million times, since it’s down the alley and there’s only 1 sign. This place is definitely one of the neighborhood’s best kept secrets – I’ve never seen so many people in any other Chinese restaurant in the area…
Being the white-bread American that I am (in a Korean body), I immediately scoured the menu for General Tso’s chicken, which was my ultimate favorite Chinese take out item when I was living back east in PA/NYC. I am getting used to the fact now that most Chinese places out here don’t have it, and the ones that do confuse it with Kung Pao chicken. So I settled on the “orange chicken” instead.
We waited quite a while for the food to come, and I ended up being the “lunch loser” since my friend’s dish came out about 10 minutes prior to mine. Drrrr.
So when it finally came out it looked great. A big healthy plate of steamed white rice and another big plate of the orange chicken…. see photos below. The chicken was really good. I really appreciated how it wasn’t breaded and fried to death — it was only lightly breaded, and the sauce was flavorful and thinner in consistency than the normal thick sauced fluorescent orange fried balls that you usually get at most Chinese places. You could definitely taste the chicken. The orange chicken chunks were in small pieces too so it was pretty easy to eat, no complaints there.
I had a fun time at Henry’s and the food was good too.
110 Natoma Street
(between 2nd St & New Montgomery St)
San Francisco, CA 94105
(415) 546-4999
www.henryshunanrestaurant.com