Greenspring Inn, 10801 Falls Road, Lutherville, (410) 823-1125. Open every day for lunch and dinner. AE, MC, V. No-smoking area: yes. Prices: appetizers, $3.25-$9; entrees, $7.95-$21. ***
Chinese restaurants have always seemed willing to modify their cuisine to suit American tastes.
I don't notice it so much in other Asian eating places. Japanese restaurants have gotten their American diners to eat raw fish and seaweed -- and not only eat them but like them. I'm not sure why the Chinese can't wean their customers from fried foods and thick sauces.
Be that as it may, some Chinese restaurants have made a virtue of what they see as a necessity. The best of these, to my mind, is the Greenspring Inn, which is an unabashedly American Chinese restaurant.
Few American customers, for instance, know or care that it's good feng shui (translated, not quite accurately, as good luck) to have lots of red and an aquarium in a Chinese restaurant. All they know is that they're tired of what they see as cliched decor. No problem. The Greenspring Inn's dining rooms are done in shades of green and peach and burgundy, with contemporary chairs, some art nouveau touches and elaborate flower arrangements. We sat under a Gustav Klimt reproduction.
If you have an authentic and esoteric dish in mind, the kitchen will be happy to prepare it for you. But the Greenspring Inn's bread and butter fare is Cantonese, with a few of the currently most popular Sichuan and Hunan dishes thrown in for good measure.
Some of the food is out-and-out American with just a slight Oriental flavor. You can, for instance, get Hong Kong style or Maryland style steamed shrimp. The latter are cooked with Old Bay. If you order them Hong Kong style, you get the same enormous shrimp steamed just long enough -- but without Old Bay and with fresh coriander and scallions. I'm not sure how you incorporate the greenery into your meal after you've shelled these pink beauties, but it certainly makes the dish look pretty.
Among the Greenspring Inn's specialties are a Maryland crab cake, broiled lobster tail, broiled fish of the day and broiled sirloin steak. This last is, well, broiled sirloin steak -- pink and flavorful. It's not sliced to make eating with chopsticks easier, and you can get A-1 sauce with it. The only thing remotely Chinese about the dish is that snow peas and fried rice come with it rather than a baked potato and salad.
Orange-flavored beef is a popular dish in Chinese restaurants. Have you ever thought how good that spicy, orange-flavored sauce with the bits of dried peel would taste with duck? It's duck a l'orange without the bones and with a little more red pepper. But at the Greenspring Inn it's not loaded down with chilies the way the original beef dish is at Sichuan restaurants. It's medium spicy, as are all the starred dishes on the menu.
One of the pleasures of eating at the Greenspring Inn is that you don't feel as if you really should be adventuresome and order the beef tendons with leeks and tofu. (Yes, a brave companion of mine actually did that once at another restaurant.) You can sit back, have one of those drinks with the little parasol and eat too many fried noodles -- those addictive bites of crisp grease -- while you look over the menu.
Then go for it. Order the Puu Puu tray.
It has crisp fried won tons filled with crab meat. Strips of beef in a faintly sweet sauce on skewers that you can twirl over the little fire. Fat spring rolls -- pretty greasy, though. Two skewers of chicken teriyaki. Roast pork. Shrimp toast. More food than two people could ever eat and go on to their main courses.
But that's another characteristic of the Greenspring Inn's dishes: ampleness. I cannot describe how much mou sou vegetables you get, but it's far more than will fit into the four pancakes that come with it. You might as well order four more to begin with.
If I had to recommend only one dish, it would be the seafood bird's nest -- even though I'm not usually wild about combinations. But the mix of lobster, shrimp, scallops and crab with perfectly cooked broccoli, snow peas and carrots in a mild white sauce was very appealing. Even the crisp potato "nest" was good.
Occasionally there's a clunker. A special that evening was crab and asparagus soup. It turned out to be a large bowl of egg drop soup with crab meat and what was either canned asparagus or fresh asparagus that had been cooked so long it looked and tasted canned. On the other hand, the waiter had been nice enough to bring it for one although the menu said "for two."
And that's another reason to like the Greenspring Inn. The service is excellent. Dishes come and go at an even pace. When a tray of food tipped over near our table it was cleaned up with as little disruption to our party as possible -- and it was cleaned up quickly.
Finally, if you had any doubts about the Greenspring Inn's American side, take a look at the dessert menu. There's the pyramid cake (chocolate with buttercream and ganache). There's the tricolor mousse (bittersweet, milk and white chocolate). There's the Mickey Mouse cheesecake. And there's the freshest, sweetest coconut cake just like Mom used to make -- except that all the desserts are made by Sweet Indulgences.
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