Xin Fu – Latham, NY

When I’m not feeling well, I like ordering Chinese takeout. I was spoiled at my previous place by having a decent takeout place right downstairs, so now with the new house comes new Chinese takeout exploration.

One of the restaurants near my house is a place called Xin Fu (1186 Troy Schenectady Rd, Latham, NY). The menu is a hybrid between (American) Chinese and Japanese dishes. For this meal, I stuck with items from the Chinese parts of the menu.

I ordered some fried dumplings [$4] to start.

The wrappers were fairly standard and were browned nicely. What was inside had quite a depth of flavor, more so than a lot of the others I have tried in the area.

The dish that really caught my eye was “Crispy Shredded Beef in Spicy Sauce” [$12 – Steak coated in carrot, bean sprouts, celery and scallion batter fried crispy and quickly tossed in a spicy sauce]

This was a really interesting dish. The sauce was not thick and goopy like many of the sauces at Americanized Chinese restaurants. This was pretty thin. It had a hefty amount of chile and had a lot of sweet in there as well. There was a little acid in the background, but it wasn’t enough to balance the amount of sweetness.

The beef was thinly sliced and was crispy, definitely overcooked by most standards. The sauce barely was able to penetrate the crust in the 10 minute ride from the restaurant to my house. I like how the veggies were presented raw atop the beef, and some white rice provided a little softness to the crispy beef and crunchy veggies.

Inside of the restaurant is very nice, and would seem like a nice place to sit down for a meal. According to their ad in the Clipper Magazine, they also own Capital Buffet on Wolf Road. It’s been a really long time since I’ve eaten there (I don’t do buffets often), but the food I tried at Xin Fu was pretty strong. Not perfect, but pretty good.