Salt-shunning salmon crudo (no longer on the menu), meanwhile, may arrive desperate for seasoning but, going by strict triage hierarchy, require acid, stat. Pork spareribs ($12.88) could be jazzed up with spicy cheongyang chili pepper sauce but devoid of exterior char. Did someone forget a pinch of salt? An entire sauce? A plate of veggie lo mein ($11.88) might come to the table watery, the sign of a rush job or an overcrowded wok. The pea stems ($11.88) you crushed on last week-the ones tricked out with crispy garlic and feathery haystacks of crispy shallot-may show up with filigree intact but not a lick of detectable sodium.

But my point is, Doo and crew’s endemic struggles are fairly settled consensus at this point and, not to pile on, but yeah, you feel it sometimes. And you don’t have to take my word for it: The restaurant’s avidly tended Instagram account doubles as a near-daily photo diary captioned with heartfelt confessionals, imploring feedback, and contrite apologies big and small. On busy nights, the likelihood runs high that at some point during your visit the kitchen will lurch off its game and into the thistly, vortex-strength underbrush of in-the-weeds-ness, and for an unpredictable stretch-will it be one wave of dishes, or the rest?-you’re in wobbly-world.

The problem is, the more you eat at Wusong Road, the clearer it becomes that this kitchen is chronically in the weeds. Better to focus on a tight roster they can hit out of the park every time. Doo says his kitchen line is typically a scrappy four-deep skeleton crew of true believers. Revivalist nostalgia projects tend to err on the side of more-is-more, especially when there’s a Kowloon-size garden of fading delights ripe for the resurrecting, making it a nice surprise to encounter curatorial rigor: On any given night Wusong Road offers just 16-ish dishes total-which makes a ton of sense. Doo grew up in the ’90s in and around his parents’ American-Chinese restaurant in Malden, and his is a thoughtful take on tiki-cocktail culture, something other bars have come under fire for commodifying and exoticizing in more recent, appropriation-conscious years. Something else diners love to see in 2022 is an honest-to-goodness personal narrative from a storyteller whose story it is to tell. Nothing against chamomile beurre blanc, but the course correction is nice to see. Vibe-wise, I think it adds just the right jolt of energy (youth-spirited, gently edgy) to Harvard Square’s dining ecosystem, which has been tacking hard in the visiting lecturers-who-lunch direction lately. You enter the second floor through a sculpted dragon’s mouth, for Pete’s sake.

The restaurant’s fantastical interior looks like a million bucks, and you’d never know it was mostly a DIY affair that cost a tiny fraction of that. Honestly, the biggest bummer about Wusong Road, chef-owner Jason Doo’s thrumming, tiki-themed ode to the sweet (also: sour) comfort-food pleasures of throwback Chinese-Americana, is that on paper the thing just sizzles.Ĭheck it: a double-decker lounge slinging craft-caliber scorpion bowls and beloved classics from the golden age of the pupu platter-crab rangoons, sticky spareribs, pick-your-protein lo mein-remastered for modern palates by a guy who used to cook at Menton. Adorably shaped pork bao and crab rangoon from the highly curated menu of American-Chinese cuisine at Wuson Road.

American chop suey boston