Tommy Li's
 Canton, Ohio        Date of Visit  01/16/16        http://tommylis.com

This is going to be rough. Got out of a movie. Stopped at a place we hadn’t ever heard of prior to driving by. It’s pretty nice inside, they were just picking up the buffet and we ordered off the mixed American/Chinese/French/??? menu. I walked in making Motley Crue jokes…I left making motley food jokes.

If you are going to build a fancy looking little spot and charge for it, you should be able to beat out the local delivery joint or the mall food court. On our trip, Tommy Li’s didn’t even get close. Our server was nice but appeared a little lost.
 

Nope.
 

She brought us lettuce wraps with white meat chicken, water chestnuts, carrots and mushrooms and a squiggle of hoisin sauce. If you are a fan of the version from the national chain, this will certainly disappoint. All the grayness of a can of feline food, it’s devoid of the sauce that makes the appetizer tasty, but it does come with a cup full of grease.

It seems they went out of their way to individually tear each leaf of lettuce and to scoop enough water onto the plate to turn the flavorless packing peanuts into mush.

Steph had two other apps the shrimp, crab and lobster bisque and the tuna with seaweed salad. The tuna was clearly long and poorly frozen, the jagged little crystals having stabbed the fish to death and turning it into texture-less slop. The cream soup had a pile of cream but little in the way of shellfish or sherry. Might have been good with some Cheerios.
 

I had the Tommy Spicy Chicken, their version of General Tso’s but generally it’s not even tso-tso. The sauce was lackluster. The chicken was soggy and stringy and chewy. The only upside is it came with a little pile of broccoli which was well done and  more florets than we usually get from our local delivery folks but nothing was going to save our experience, including the bowl of cold and boring fried rice. I imagine it tastes better “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room”.