Hung Far Low (2410 SE 82nd Ave)

The thing about CitySearch is that I trust it. If it says that a place of business is on the Best Of List, then I trust that someone somewhere said that it was one of the best in the city. I really should have learned my lesson when I found a hair salon that was rated 8.6 on the Best Of List, that turned out to be located next to an animal hospital as well as being the workplace of my "stylist" (yes, I do need to put it in quotes - "stylist" is a huge overstatement of her career choice) whose introduction to me was "I'm SO glad you don't have a complicated haircut. I am so hungover from partying last night. I just want to go back to sleep." Besides the fact that she was dressed in red velour short shorts, a wrinkled white tank top and had obviously not cleaned off her eye makeup from the night before, she was one of the owners. Did someone really say that this salon was an 8.6 out of 10? Really?

Hung Far Low was rated a 7.1 on CitySearch. The red leathery menus boast their existence of almost 80 years in Portland. I wonder who's been eating here for 80 years. Perhaps the owner of Hung Far Low paid off the people at CitySearch to give his restaurant a favorable rating.

The Appetizer Platter consisted of several different deep fried morsels, including shrimp, chicken, crab puffs, egg rolls, along with some barbequed pork. The platter was almost overflowing and was enough for five or six people. The batter on the chicken was thicker and had more substance than the meat that it surrounded. It was quite bready and not crunchy. The crab puffs, though were excellent. The dipping sauce that came along with the appetizers was not spicy at all, a red sauce with a very small dollop of mild mustard and some sesame seeds.

The Egg Flower Soup was a thick, glistening yellow liquid, with crunchy vegetables floating in every bite. I was fascinated that when I filled my spoon, the soup was perfectly still, not sloshing as soup usually does, but stable and almost jello-like. Almost. It was still soupy enough that it didn't gross me out. Until Jen found a hair in her soup. Not a long hair. It was probably an eyelash or an eyebrow hair. But it was still a hair.

I have had General Tso's Chicken at a lot of different restaurants and usually General Tso does a pretty good job of enlivening my mouth. I don't enjoy food that is so spicy that I can't taste it, but a little effort from the chiles is necessary to make it to the happy medium. They can't just lie there on the plate, listless and dead, eeking out the last bit of flavor left in their tired little bodies into the sauce. No, I need my chiles to be excited about where they are going and what they are doing. The chiles in my chicken were pretty much dried up. It's like when you go to use your cinnamon after a really long time and you open the jar and there's no smell. It's so old that it doesn't have any smell at all. I think that's what happened to my chiles. I hope they weren't as old as the restaurant.

The fortune cookie was good, though. I actually got a fortune, and not a piece of advice: "You will have many friends when you need them." That was nice.

Who votes on CitySearch, anyway? Does anyone know? Or is it one of the mysteries of the universe? Hung Far Low would get a 3.4 at the very most from me. The hair in the soup is an automatic 4 point deduction, then taking the taste and consistency into consideration, it has to be that low. You do get a lot of food for your money, though, even if it is mediocre food.