Dad's Dining Picks

[tongodeon]

sploof/zoot_speaks asked me for advice about Chinese resturants in Boston, so I sent this email to my parents:

A long time ago I *think* you guys went to visit Dan in Boston. You ended up eating dinner in a very good Chinese resturant that you're still raving about to this day. Do you remember which one it was?

Dad's response:

I think it was on the banks of

Comments

[matrushkaka]

I think you should start a second LJ, called tongo_dadisms for things like this.

tasteless, moi?

[eejitalmuppet]

That kid would have been in his element on talk like a pirate day...

[doublejack]

Where do I go to nominate this for best blog entry of all time?

[haineux]

It might have been Joyce Chen Small Eating Place. Now it's an MIT dorm. There are no Joyce Chen restos left. Joyce Chen retired after getting Alzheimer's disease. All that's left is the brand name, which is owned by various and sundry crappy companies. Chen is credited with popularizing Mandarin-style chinese food.

You could always go to Mary Chung's restaurant in Central Square, Cambridge, which is supremely good Szechwan food. Yes, it's entirely unlike Mandarin food. I am not sure where the best Mandarin places are these days.

official old fart comment

[mmcirvin]

Mary Chung's is good, but the Chinese restaurant that used to be in that spot before Mary Chung's was twice as good.

Sam and I have always been a fan of Yenching at Harvard Square, but conventional wisdom seems to be that it is terrible (the phrase "made me want to yench" came up), which I don't understand. I think some people may be confusing it with another nearby restaurant, either Young and Yee's or the Hong Kong, both of which have nasty food (you go to the Kong for the scorpion bowls, not the food).

Re: official old fart comment

[mmcirvin]

...It may also depend on what you order. There's a cheap place called Tai Sheng Garden in Chelmsford where I eat lunch a lot. They've got the usual Americanized Chinese rice-plate specials and they're pretty bad, basically what you'd expect from a low-end suburban Chinese restaurant. But the place is actually run by Taiwanese people and they've got a huge variety of Taiwanese noodle soups that are delicious and constitute a full meal. The pork and pickle soup (#449) is choice.

[sploof]

So many choices...

This all started because my Wednesday afternoon class is in chinatown, and surrounded by little hole-in-the-wall chinese and vietnamese places. I'm used to knowing most of what there is to know about the cuisine where I live, and now I'm lost in Boston.

I wanna know if it's one of those two-pronged "gripper" hooks, or if it's a "Captain Hook" deal. Does he hold his chopsticks in the hook, or just spear his snow peas with it?

[haineux]

Brezhnev's (aka King Fung Garden) is probably still good. Get the Shang Hai Chow Mein (huge noodles the diameter of a pencil, with oily-meaty stuff) or the Hon Sue Beef (which is actually Szechwan Dry Cook Beef Shred in disguise).