Sky Express - Costa Mesa

At Sky Express, the lone Chinese food stall at the predominately Japanese Mitsuwa Marketplace, stick with the simple and starchy. No matter how tempting the plastic dim sum mockups appear to look, you’re better off saving your cravings until you can get to Arcadia for Din Tai Fung or the San Gabriel Valley in general. They simply don’t have enough turnover on the dim sum to make it the way it should be made.

What you want here is whatever’s on special, a bowl of noodle soup, or anything that comes with rice.

For dinner one night, I took the dish you see above: fried swoops of battered pork chop, smothered in a cornstarch-thickened black bean sauce, the whole thing dumped over a mound of steamed white rice and framed by ring of baby bok choy—a work-a-day meal that works.

On the plate is everything that fits in my definition of comfort food: it starts with rice and involves something pork, something gravy and something green. What I loved about it is how positively homey it was, how accessible it would be to all palates; but at the same time, slightly funky thanks to the presence of fermented black beans.

With all due respect to the thickening powers of roux, for me, there’s no better mouth feel than when a cornstarch-silkened sauce mingles with rice to form spoonfuls of what I call “yum.”

Sky Express
665 Paularino Ave
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
(714) 437-7198

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