I have a place just like that around the corner.
The food sucks.The best Chinese place I’ve ever eaten at is exactly this. My sister was on the son’s soccer team and my mom gave the kid a ride to practice a few times. The parents paid us in our usual orders for helping them out.
This is my favorite place (China Gourmet). $6 for one of those classic 4 compartment styrofoam boxes crammed so full of food it barely even shuts, and the food is the best shit you’ve ever tasted.
I was going to one for a while where the wife never even asked my name when I ordered. Not even the first time. Yet, when I showed up, she knew. Same for every customer.
I used a seamstress for 20 years. Same thing.
Their excellent yet casual customer service is a thing of beauty. I’m impressed with their ability to do that.
A lot of it, honestly, might be just coming from a society where everyone hasn’t been ground down into a weird consumerist nightmare of uncaring existence.
Once you’ve experienced health care or restaurants or factories or more or less anything, in a location where people you are interacting with treat one another like interesting valuable human beings worthy of respect and human interaction, even if there’s some money involved, it starts to seem really weird the American way where everything has to be on a system and no one gives a shit.
It’s generally pretty easy to figure out by the timing and also by context. You know you have three takeout orders up and you know approximately what the voices sounded like over the phone so you can take a good guess at matching a face to it. Occasionally we’d get it wrong on the first guess, but we’d always verify the contents of the order and phone number before forking it over.
And it’s dead easy when you only have one takeout order open. The customer still thinks you’re psychic. They won’t know the other six bags lined up on the back of the steam table are all deliveries…
You also get to know all your regulars pretty quickly.
There was a Thai place I used to go to a lot. Hours were inconsistent and they would close for months at a time when the brothers who owned it would go back to Thailand from time to time. Best Thai food I’ve ever had. More impressive though was their customer service. Super friendly and they remembered everyone’s names.
You could go there for the first time, not go again for months, and the next time you showed up they’d greet you by name and remember what it was you had ordered last time.
went to a korean restaurant with 2 friends, one of them their grandma was the owner. and the grandma refused to let us pay for our delicious meal. absolutely refused. that was a great day
I judge my Chinese food by the condition of the place, if it’s super fancy and well kept, not going to be that good. If the building looks like it’s ready to be condemned, you damn well know it’s gonna be the best Chinese food you have ever had
Also MSG is the best.
MSG is the king of flavour!
It needs to have those backlit pictures of the food above the counter where most of the color has faded away.
Ours closed down because health inspector 🙃 it’s coming back though thank the lord
I honestly don’t care if a rat had it’s brood on the food. That shit is delicious.
lemongrass beef with jalapeños extra spicy over fried rice can’t be beat.
This perfectly describes a Chinese joint near me called Jewel’s Noodles.
Oh yeah, I know that place.
- constant stream of Asian students from the nearby university
- enormous menu, but somehow everything is made quickly
- additional staff are either family from the old country, or Latinos
- flyers in Mandarin (?) for things like churches, lawyers, and real estate agents.
everything is made quickly
Like instantly
It’s because of the 4 jet engines they call wok burners they got back there. Brings chicken from frozen to perfectly cooked in thirty seconds, complete with that smokey wok hei flavor
TIL about wok burners. And about a upgrade for the gas range at home.
But high heath and vaporizing cooking oil, sounds really unhealthy to me.
But it’s so delicious
To your last point they have at least one Shen Yun poster.
Idk, every Chinese person I know hates Shen Yun
it depends on the chinese in question. its because the people in Shen Yun are from the Falun Gong, which was a notorious religious group im china that was exiled and migrated to the U.S. The are staunchly anti CCP
Ehhh, they’re really only anti-CCP in the fact that they’re mad THEIR boots aren’t the ones doing the stomping. They’re still authoritarians, just not of the communist stripe.
And staunchly religious. This is one case of enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
And also staunchly nut jobs
Also the menu is huge but it’s all composed from like 6 ingredients.
Also, pay in cash.
The one I encountered with the best food by far had a little like 11-year-old daughter who would take orders and work the register when things got busy. Maybe it is child labor but I feel like all the kids in the family were getting a solid upbringing.
As someone who moves around a lot, finding a decent Chinese takeout place is extremely difficult. I’m constantly chasing the high of finding a restaurant that actually makes everything fresh (and had an authentic non-americanized menu). 95% of small town spots just sell the generic and tasteless Sysco meals because people just don’t know how much better it can be.
Chinese is a tough one but those restaurants that are just a counter and a table or two in the back of an ethnic grocery tend to be where the really good food is.
Found a hole in the wall Japanese restaurant when I was doing minor traveling for a doctor’s appointment. There were 4 tables and 3 employees. One table was 3 dudes talking about how they don’t understand their sons’ obsession with Minecraft and another table was me. Anime themes were just blasting from a bluetooth speaker. Food was the best Japanese food I’ve ever had and was so goddamn cheap for what it was. I have to go back to the area twice in September and I intend to eat there again each time because it was such a good experience.
I have better luck with Latin grocers in that regard. The only specialty Asian grocer in a few hours radius doesn’t even have fresh produce. The only produce they do sell is old and literally has an H Mart label on it lol. They will sell you some black market kimchi if you ask though.
I used to live near one where neither parent spoke very good English, so they had their teenage daughter answering phones and handling payment while her five year old brother rolled around on a tricycle.
The amazing thing was she was better at taking phone orders than anyone I’ve had to deal with. Her voice was clear and easy to understand, with no pots clattering in the background. She would read the order back to me and then tell me how much it was going to be and when it would be ready. You’d think this is normal stuff but it almost never happens when I call in an order, which is why I use DoorDash instead.
10/10 would order from there again.
I went to one Vietnamese restaurant all the time that was exactly like this. I ate there so often, one time when they were full they let me sit at the table with their son doing homework. I felt so honored.
Did you copy their work
Probably too high level to understand
I worked at one of these places for a while. My primary duties: Delivery, manning the phones, being a native English speaker. I gained a lot of insight about the Chinese takeout industry.
Also, you’ve never lived until you’ve seen the owner’s wife march out into the lobby and whack the shit out of some hood rat with a giant spoon.
I am guessing that the giant spoon was something like these
It was a massive stainless steel ladle used for the stock pot. Must be every bit of three feet long, including the hook on the end of the handle.
Ahh so that was the flavour I had a hard time identifying in my won ton soup
