E-Mail This Article to a Friend My Chinatown The Phoenix dining critic reflects on a neighborhood of superior cuisine BY ROBERT NADEAU
	Dig yourself to China • Big Fish Seafood, 20 Tyler Street, Boston, (617) 423-3288. • Buddha’s Delight, 3 Beach Street, Boston, (617) 451-2395. • Chau Chow City, 81 Essex Street, Boston, (617) 338-8158. • China Pearl, 9 Tyler Street, Boston, (617) 426-4338. • Chinatown Eatery, 44-46 Beach Street, Boston. • East Ocean City, 27 Beach Street, Boston, (617) 524-2504. • Empire Garden, 690 Washington Street, Boston, (617) 482-8898. • Ginza, 16 Hudson Street, Boston, (617) 338-2261. • Grand Chau Chow, 45 Beach Street, Boston, (617) 292-5166. • Imperial Seafood, 70 Beach Street, Boston, (617) 426-8439. • Jumbo Seafood Restaurant, 7 Hudson Street, Boston, (617) 542-2823. • King Fung Garden, 74 Kneeland Street, Boston, (617) 357-5262. • New Shanghai Restaurant, 21 Hudson Street, Boston, (617) 338-6688. • Ocean Wealth, 8 Tyler Street, Boston, (617) 423-1338. • Peach Farm Restaurant, 4 Tyler Street, Boston, (617) 482-1116. • Penang, 685 Washington Street, Boston, (617) 451-6373. • Pho Pasteur, 682 Washington Street, Boston, (617) 482-7467. • Quality Café, 50 Beach Street, Boston, (617) 988-8006. • Taiwan Café, 34 Oxford Street, Boston, (617) 426-8181. • Yan’s Best Place, 52 Beach Street, Boston, (617) 338-6223. — RN

Aside from the established superiority of Chinese cuisine, convention-goers shouldn’t miss Boston’s Chinatown for practical and political reasons: 1) Chinatown is a few stops from the FleetCenter on the Orange Line, the only functional transportation this week. 2) Chinatown restaurants are open early and late, some very good ones until 4 a.m. 3) No one will accuse you of eating French food if you dine out in Chinatown. 4) Chinese food is relatively inexpensive; there has never been a political scandal about putting Chinese food on the expense account. 5) Out-of-town visitors often want seafood. There’s no larger concentration of restaurants serving excellent local seafood than these. You want a lobster? Have it Cantonese-style with ginger and scallion, and you may never go back to drawn butter. Looking for a mess of clams? Have them with black-bean sauce, and you may never go back to fried strips. But if you do like fried seafood, well, Chinese restaurants have been satisfying that desire for centuries.

In addition to foods from the major regions of Chinese gastronomy, Boston’s Chinatown also provides three restaurants specializing in Japanese food (who knew?), along with snack bars, noodle houses, Singaporean delights, Vietnamese tidbits, three bakeries, and late-night grocery shopping.

Live-tank seafood

All these restaurants keep a few lobsters in their saltwater aquariums, but most also have crabs, shrimp, eels, sea bass, striped bass, tautogs, or other fish and shellfish at times. The standard seafood menu, now called "Hong Kong seafood" (lobsters or crabs with ginger and scallion, clams in black-bean sauce, pea-pod stems, and salt-and-pepper-fried shrimp or squid), doesn’t always come out of the tanks, but most of the steamed whole fish will. Also, ask about specials.

Big Fish Seafood is new and a personal favorite for live-tank shrimp and steamed whole scallops in the half shell. Chau Chow City is one of the largest restaurants in Chinatown, serving dim sum (see below) at lunch daily. Despite Chau Chow’s name, which alludes to the Teochow (Swatowese) origins of the owners, Teochow dishes are a sideshow to the restaurant’s generally Hong Kong–seafood sort of menu. East Ocean City is named for Hong Kong, while Jumbo Seafood Restaurant, another of my favorites, has a large mural of the Hong Kong skyline. Ocean Wealth is another popular eatery in this style, as is Peach Farm Restaurant, an expanded basement with an emphasis on speed from wok to table that makes the fried seafood and vegetables particularly good.

Dim sum

For lunch or brunch, many Chinese-American delegates will be stopping in for teahouse snacks. These assorted dumplings are served only on weekends by many restaurants, hence this selected list of places that serve them every day. Dim sum isn’t familiar outside of big-city Chinatowns, but they are lots of fun and easy to get started with. Carts come by, and you point at whatever looks good. Be sure to get some "har gow," the shell-shaped shrimp-pork dumplings in rice pasta. A lot of different things might add up to $20 per person. Chau Chow City is a good choice, as is China Pearl, a refurbished and upgraded restaurant whose owners have strong ties to local Democratic politics (it also hosts large Asian weddings). Empire Garden is another enormous place with dim sum; look for the elaborate decorations left over from its days as the balcony of a vaudeville theater. Imperial Seafood was the pioneer in everyday dim sum, and still does a good job. For some reason, almost all these places are upstairs, and typically feature Hong Kong seafood at night.

Smaller places

For Cantonese-style dishes and Hong Kong seafood, start with Grand Chau Chow, the mother of Chau Chow City. Yan’s Best Place is a modest storefront just above street level that manages excellent Hong Kong seafood.

Specialties

Chinatown also has a number of restaurants with offbeat specialties.

Vegan cuisine. Fake meat and real vegetables are offered at Buddha’s Delight, a restaurant where Senator Lieberman can eat everything on the menu. In fact, many of the patrons observe Jewish dietary laws, and it’s also safe for Muslims, high-cast Hindus, Seventh-day Adventists, and all their friends.

Down-home cuisine. More like a Singaporean hawker center is the Chinatown Eatery, a food court featuring the street food of many Asian regions. If you like congee soup with a cruller for breakfast, this is where to get some.

Sushi. Chinatown has three Japanese restaurants, of which Ginza is very good, offering more than a dozen brands of sake. It’s open until 4 a.m. most nights, so it’s become a late-night youth scene.

Malaysian cuisine. If you like Indian, Chinese, and Indonesian food, have we got a cuisine for you! Penang has all that plus fusion, plus enough South Sea décor to revive memories of Trader Vic’s. Don’t miss the curried-roti-canai appetizer, anything in a taro nest, and the satays.

Mandarin cuisine. Although Chinatown traditionally features the food of Southern China, King Fung Garden, in a converted gas station, has a long-standing cult following for huge plates of dumplings and Northern-style entrées.

Shanghai cuisine. On a hot night, you might want to try the cold-appetizer plates at the New Shanghai Restaurant.

Pho. Chinatown has several restaurants whose names start with "pho," which is a North Vietnamese beef-based noodle soup that’s cheap, refreshing, and highly recommended. One of the oldest, Pho Pasteur, is still one of the best. But the others are all quite serviceable, and some have full menus of Vietnamese food, a cuisine that runs to beef dishes and salads.

Bubble tea. This is the fad snack of Asian and Asian-American youth. If you haven’t tried it, step into Quality Café and sample a fruit or coffee flavor (or green tea, the original). You get something that looks like a Coffee Coolatta with black marbles in it, and a magnum straw, the better to gobble the marbles (which are tapioca pearls). If bubble tea isn’t your idea of dessert, Chinatown has three fine bakeries, which offer more or less familiar cakes and cookies, as well as addictive oddities like black-bean doughnuts covered with sesame seeds.

Taiwanese cuisine. Taiwan Café does a splendid job on this cuisine, which runs to cold appetizers (don’t scoff at pigs’ ears till you’ve tried them), fried morsels, and an amazing platter of sautéed eggplant with basil.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com