freeamfva: American Chinese food is the best American comfort food

freeamfva

Chinese food is quintessential American comfort food. No, we’re not talking about the myriad authentic options that dot the D.C. area red with chile oil and numbing, tingling peppers, such as Great Wall Szechuan House on 14th Street NW, or that perfect a regional style of cooking, like Rockville’s Xi’an Gourmet — all terrific eating in their own right.To get more news about shanghai Chinese cuisine, you can visit shine news official website.

This is a love letter to the restaurants with sprawling, triple-digit-count menus that serve up wire-handled cartons of General Tso’s chicken or beef and broccoli, the results of immigrant ingenuity melding with American tastes. Think of the varied combinations of rice or noodles and proteins swimming in mother sauces including dark, silken oyster and syrupy orange and red — you probably have your own favorite that hits a specific kind of nostalgic feeling.

In an era during which most restaurants are revamping their operations for carryout, Chinese takeout remains a surefire neighborhood staple, which made it all the more fun for chef Tim Ma to research when he was prepping to open his latest restaurant, Lucky Danger, an American Chinese pop-up in his currently dormant Prather’s on the Alley in Mount Vernon Triangle.
Ma, a Chinese American who fondly recalls his uncle’s Chinese restaurant in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., as the center of his family’s goings-on, has been prolific in the area’s dining scene — by his own count, Lucky Danger is his 10th restaurant concept — but he has typically modeled his cooking off his study at the French Culinary Institute.

“Normally, for American Son or Kyrisan, you’re researching Michelin or fine dining restaurants,” Ma says, but in meeting with his brain trust for Lucky Danger, they had different jumping off points in mind. “Yum’s . . . China Wonder, literally I was like, ‘Everybody on the phone, tell me what [your] go-to Chinese takeout is.’ And that is who we’re comparing ourselves to.”Chef Danny Lee grew up eating American Chinese food in the Virginia suburbs, and the ritual of it brings a welcome sense of nostalgia when he’s able to gather with family. The co-owner of Chiko and Anju says that his late father’s favorite restaurant was the departed Wu’s Garden in Vienna, and that the Lees would dine there three to four nights a week in his youth. A table at Wu’s became as essential as his family’s dining table.

“The lazy susan . . . something as simple as getting that hot pot of tea at the end of the meal to help you digest,” Lee says. “And then getting the fortune cookies, and then reading my fortune out to my sister, my sister reading it to our dad and then vice versa and laughing about it — sure, is it gimmicky? Yeah, but I think some of those gimmicks sometimes create some of the strongest familial memories that stay with you for the rest of your life.”

My fondness for the cuisine owes itself to my Vietnamese parents, who craved the visual bait of these restaurants. They would debate the freshness and merits of a plate of roast pork with crackling skin or whether a whole steamed fish with ginger scallion sauce was a better pick to twirl around our lazy susan. When you think about some of your favorite restaurants, it’s not always about the food but the time you were able to spend there.

Perhaps undertaking such an accounting of the “best” Chinese restaurants — especially at a time when we can’t forge those bonds in person — is a fool’s errand. For some of us, the answer to the question of what’s the best Chinese takeout is simply the one closest to your home. And you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to stake that claim.

So in that spirit, I looked for a takeout spot that best captured the spirit of that nostalgic, comforting cuisine in each of D.C.’s eight wards, plus the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. When ordering, I usually went with a sweetened, crispy chicken dish (General Tso’s, but occasionally orange or sesame), a noodle dish and, if available, the District classic of fried chicken wings and mumbo sauce.