Restaurant When Zhou - good food for CNY season

"You can never go wrong with Chinese food!" - one of by HT couple's guiding principles in eating.  Just in time for Chinese New Year, we treated ourselves with good, delicious, authentic chinese food, served chinese style (not those fancy Chinees-Indisch restaurants scattered around NL).

When we enter the place, we were the first diners and a child was sitting on a round table with lazy susan, studying with her mom.  The mom stood up immediately and welcomed us with a big smile.  She immediately took care of us, bringing us the menu and letting ourselves be comfortable.  She tried to speak to me in Mandarin, but I can only answer her in nods and sign languages so she switched to Dutch, and all I can say was Ja (yes) or Nee (no).  Whew!  It was a lot of work just to get yummy food.

No fancy plates, bowl and chinese spoon...i'm starting to get excited...

And free tea!  As it's very seldom you can get free water in restaurants here, so getting a pot of chinese tea made me feel at home :D

For starters...

We ordered the 10-pcs steamed dumplings.  They don't have much choices of dimsum so we didn't expect much.  (You can already see how thick the skins are)

Although the filling had a very small amount of meat with leeks or chives, it was very tasty or we might have been deprived from it almost half a year, thus, we enjoyed it!

For mains, we ordered Duck Claypot - I fancy duck in Asian dishes lately (not sure why).  I was asked if I don't mind the leg part and I gave a big answer of no!  Though i know the breast has a lot of meat in it, but in claypot stew, I think bones add some flavors.  And I was right!  It was so delicious that I slurped the sauce like a soup and let my bowl of rice swam with it.  (HT hubbie was amazed how much rice I had eaten :D).  The duck pieces are not too soft and not too hard and chewy, it was cooked just right.  Licking those small bones, I felt really at home!  This dish was cooked with those big chinese mushrooms and leafy veggies.

bacon/pork belly can never disappoint you and that included this plate.  Cooked with bamboo shoots and mushrooms, the pork belly were very savory.  It was cooked up to the right texture, making it delightful to eat.  The sauce was heavenly as well.

Here's a shot of how the restaurant looks like.  Aquariums (i think there were 2), very Chinese, eh?

While eating, we were reminiscing our life in Singapore and how time flew fast, that we're already half a year in NL. Happy HT couple went home with full stomach and can't wait for their flight back to Asia soon.

To my family and friends in Singapore, Philippines, Netherlands, Taiwan, Malaysia, China, Australia, US, Swiss and Belgium...

恭喜发财! (Happy CNY!)

Price Summary (in Euro)
Main dishes ranges from 15 to 20 (including crabs)

Restaurant When Zhou
Rozenstraat 13,
Utrecht, Netherlands
(near Bijenkorf, beside parking entrance)