Last week, I thought it was time to go back to eat at a Plymouth restaurant, so I looked at several places including the Plymouth Hotel Kitchen and Bar. On July 22, I sent one of the Plymouth Hotel’s recent menus to my mother, but she wasn’t interested. An hour later, I received a new menu from the Plymouth Hotel via e-mail, and I mentioned to my mother that one of the featured meals was pancit bihon, which is a Filipino noodle dish with soy sauce, vegetables, and meat. She approved.
So, I called the Plymouth Hotel and ordered the pancit bihon for my mother. I ordered the lumpia as well as banana lumpia and coconut sauce for dessert. Since all the other dessert dishes on the menu were ice cream, which my mother can’t eat because she’s sensitive to lactose, she had some Open Nature sorbet in the freezer for dessert.
The cheerful woman on the phone took my order and told me our meal would be ready in about 25 minutes. We arrived a little more than a half-hour later and entered the dining room that was filled with people at the bar. I saw two couples sitting at tables. A few seconds after we walked in, an employee came up to my mother and me and she asked if we were there to eat. I told her we had an order to pick up, and she promptly went back to get the bag.
The woman came back a minute later carrying a large paper bag with a twine handle. I took the bag and put it on a nearby dining table that wasn’t filled as we processed our payment. A couple of minutes later, we were out of the restaurant and on our way home to Jackson.
Once we got home, we took three bagasse containers out of the bag. Each container had writing on the top lid, so we knew who got which box.
My Meal
Three six-inch-long lumpia pieces were in the bagasse containers along with two small lidded cups containing what the menu said were traditional dipping sauces. As I bit into the first piece, the golden-brown crust was crunchy but not hard and I could taste the spiced beef and pork right away. I could also taste the mixed vegetables inside, though I had to look closely to see a few bits of peas and carrots.
One of the dipping sauces was a reddish-brown color and the other was clear. Tasting each sauce confirmed my initial suspicions when I first looked at them: the reddish-brown sauce was soy sauce, and the clear sauce was vinegar-based. Both sauces had spices included that helped give them a sweeter taste, and I had plenty of both left over to use for dinner a few nights later.
There were only two pieces of banana lumpia, but like the beef and pork lumpia, the banana lumpia pieces were also six inches long. A small lidded cup of coconut sauce sat in a corner of the bagasse container.
The first piece of banana lumpia had a crispy shell with flavorful chunks of banana inside. Tasting the lumpia dipped in the coconut sauce made it easy for me to believe I was in a restaurant somewhere in the tropics. The second piece was bland and only the coconut sauce gave this piece any flavor.
Mom’s Meal
The pancit bihon looked like the noodle dishes we’ve had at Thai Siam with translucent rice noodles, shrimp, chicken, two lemon wedges, shredded carrots, pieces of celery and cabbage, as well as shredded scallions on top. A small lidded cup with soy sauce was in the corner of the Styrofoam box.
Right after my mother took the pancit bihon from the box onto her dinner plate, she frowned. “There are the little tiny shrimp you get at the supermarket,” she said. Even though she was disappointed in the size of the shrimp, she didn’t have any complaints about the taste. She was also surprised to find chicken in her noodles and was pleasantly surprised that there were so many large chunks of fresh chicken to eat.
The Verdict
My mother kept a lot of the noodles for her two lunches the following weekend, and she told me the noodles stayed fresh and flavorful both days. I thought the meat lumpia was fine, but my stomach thought there weren’t enough of them, so I also finished off a bag of Open Nature veggie chips with my meal. My stomach also told me five total lumpia pieces (meat and banana) had enough fried pastry for me to handle.
I’m not as pleased with the ability to get information from the Plymouth Hotel. The website has a popup message asking to join their Facebook group because the message says it’s the best way to stay in touch. But the site isn’t updated regularly, such as with the latest menu. The website doesn’t have the latest menu posted, either, and it still wasn’t posted two days after we ate there. I had to e-mail the Plymouth Hotel from its Facebook page to ask for the latest menu.
So, we give a green light for Plymouth Hotel Kitchen and Bar, with the caveat that if you want to see the menu ahead of time for dine-in or take-out, you may need to work to get it.
The total price for our food was a little short of $34.00.
Want to Try Them?
Plymouth Hotel Kitchen and Bar is located at 9356 Main Street in Plymouth. They’re open for dinner from 5:00 p.m. through 9:00 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and closed Sundays through Wednesdays. They serve light meals, weekly dinner meals, pizzas, and desserts.
Visit their Facebook profile page for their latest offerings, or you can visit their website. You can e-mail them from either online location. Call them with questions and/or order a take-out meal at 209-245-4544.
Amador Business Ticker food reviews are adventures in local dining with Editor Eric Butow and his mom.
