![]() If you need an extra bowl or set of chopsticks, fetch it yourself - no one will notice. The young waitresses are prompt and courteous, but they're too rushed to give you much personal attention. So select a starchy bun to go with your soup, for example, or a tart, spicy salad to play off against a little plate of rich meat. Don't worry about distinguishing between appetizers and entrees the secret isn't so much the sequencing of the dishes as the contrast and balance between them. Just about everything is delicious, so circle with abandon - at these prices, you can shrug off your mistakes. You order by circling your choices on a paper menu and giving it to your server. They fall into seven basic categories, although they're not labeled that way on the menu: big meal-in-a-bowl soups with meat and noodles (items 0 through 8) big bowls of noodles with sauce (11 through 15) smaller versions of the soups without noodles (21 through 28) meats or vegetables served over rice (31 through 33) dim sum snacks (40 through 56) small, stand-alone portions of cured or marinated meats (61 through 65) and salads of bean curd and vegetables (71 through 85). What's left? A long menu of wonderful dishes. Meats are used sparingly, and you won't find any seafood at all. The prices, happily, are at least 20 years behind the times, with the most expensive item weighing in at $4.95. There are lots of wheat-based dishes in this cuisine and little in the way of rice. It's a spare but pleasant little restaurant, squeaky-clean and jammed with Chinese families on weekends. (Funny, though, how our sense of adventure can wane at the prospect of duck tongue and pig ears.) Ready for a preview of what may be the next stage? Try A & J, the only Washington area outpost of an international chain of Northern Chinese restaurants with outlets in Taipei, Beijing, Los Angeles and San Jose. And since this is also the Age of Complete Disclosure, we're demanding to know what those untranslated Chinese menus say. Now, in the Cantonese Ascendancy, restaurants are hung with roasted birds and pigs instead of paper lanterns, and we're rediscovering animal fat. The Dim Sum Dynasty had us popping mini-pastries with our fingers. Then came the Great Szechuan-Hunan Revolution, when we attacked General Tso's chicken with chopsticks. ![]() First there was the Red-and-Gold-Dragon Period, when everybody ate egg foo yong with a fork. Consider the evolution of the Chinese restaurant. Full dinner with tax and tip about $12 per person. to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 11:30 a.m. Luis said, “I can and I will”.By Mark Barnett Gail Barnett September 21, 1997Ī & J RESTAURANT - 1319-C ROCKVILLE PIKE, ROCKVILLE. If I put together a group of twenty people, could he put together some off-menu items. I messaged Luis Vargas, the owner of Dragon Chino and, perhaps, the hardest working restauranteur in town. They do a few similar dishes including excellent pork or shrimp, steamed or fried dumplings but no haw gaw, no shu mai, none of those other dishes that I can’t spell. And it’s quite a good Chinese restaurant. Now we do have a Chinese restaurant in San Miguel. We’d only been back in San Miguel de Allende for three weeks but I was already suffering from separation anxiety. Those wonderful little Chinese treats, steamed or fried, three or four to the serving, that date back to the 10th Century tea houses on the Silk Road in the province of Canton. It’s a once a week, absolutely-every-week-that-we’re-there, tradition in Toronto.
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