This is my last meal, from the best mom 'n pop Chinese takeout in my neighborhood (and anywhere else)
-
Y'all may have noticed me mentioning how my town, Rockville, MD, is the real Chinatown of the DC area. Rockville is an increasingly dense & bougie suburb of DC, but back in the day before it got all gentrified, Rockville was (and still is) a bustling hub of mom 'n pop restaurants from all over the world, tucked into random-ass strip malls and other holes in the wall.
There's a huge Chinese population in Rockville, and overall it's about 20% Asian. Being a Jew from Rockville means that I am quite enamored with Chinese food. There are 3 standard types of Chinese restaurant in Rockville: 1) old-school Americanized Chinese; 2) combo places with Americanized and authentic menus, where the authentic one is written in Chinese and may or may not have English translations; 3) super legit authentic places that may also have Americanized offerings.
I will put Rockville Chinese food up against Chinese food anywhere else in the US. We muthafuckin THROW DOWN.
I have many favorites and go-to's, but my absolute #1 favorite Chinese restaurant, and favorite restaurant ever, is China Taste: a little hole in the wall in a little strip mall that's been there forever, on a side street right off the main drag.
This Google Street View image perfectly captures the juxtaposition of old school strip mall Rockville and dense bougie gentrified Rockville. I'm sure the land it sits on is worth a fortune, and any number of developers would kill to get their hands on it. The Putt-Putt mini golf that used to be up the street and was a class-A birthday party venue in the 80s & 90s has long since been replaced by a highrise apartment building. But this crappy little strip mall with a dry cleaners, China Taste, beer & wine store and nail salon just keeps trucking along.
China Taste is the 2nd combo type of Chinese restaurant I described above: they have an extensive Americanized menu, and sushi, and an authentic menu that lists everything in Chinese first with English underneath. The inside is nothing fancy at all. It's not the cheapest in the world, which is totally fine. They specialize in HUGE portions of food that can best be described as the platonic ideal of fresh high quality mom 'n pop greasy spoon Chinese, regardless of which menu you're ordering from. The entree sizes are "medium" and "large" and even the "medium" is a bigass portion, more than you'd get at many other places. And when I say mom 'n pop I mean it. The same people have been working the counter there for as long as I can remember.
You see all kinds of folks getting food at China Taste, from literally every walk of life and ethnicity. It's such a cherished Rockville institution that they managed to stay slammed with business throughout covid, even though they've never gotten around to making a website, and have yet to reopen indoor dining. I order from them so much that a couple years ago, I went and grabbed the highest-quality menu pics people posted on Yelp and compiled them into a PDF.
On to the food!
First up: kung pao tofu. This is breaded & fried tofu tossed in a dry-ish seasoning/sauce with the standard kung pao peanuts, peppers & onions. It's not gloopy and saucy at all. The breading's not crunchy because of the sauce it sops up. Whatever their breading & frying method is, there's no wateriness left to the tofu, it has the perfect bounce & squish and the breading is the sauce/seasoning delivery vehicle. I have a favorite tofu dish at each of my favorite Chinese joints, and this is the best tofu thing at China Taste. Chef kiss.
Next up we've got vegetable chow fun. Chow fun is wide flat rice noodles much like you'd see in Thai cooking. Think of it as your kinda standard takeout lo mein but with different noodles. China Taste's noodle dishes including lo main are straight FIRE across the board but the chow fun is one of my two absolute favorites. The noodles have so much sauce but manage to stay both squishy and firm without getting all clumped and stuck to each other. The veggies are fresh and plentiful.
Side note: the other absolute best noodle dish is the Taiwan style sauteed handmade noodles. Same vibe, but these are hand made thick wheat noodles. Not from last night's dinner. Either one would be suitable for my last meal but last night I was in a chow fun kind of mood.
Last but not least is a big ole bucket of mixed veggies. All of which are fresh and perfectly cooked and swimming in the best thick savory brown sauce of indeterminate name.
(The other last meal veggie choice from them would be szechuan string beans but I couldn't find a pic of them in my camera roll.)
As much as I embrace the bougie gentrified new Rockville, which I do with a laugh and an eye roll, this is is the old school, still-here other side of Rockville. I hope it stays there forever. I plan to live for a long time and they better be around to make some kung pao tofu and noodles for me when it's time to kick the bucket.
-
@texturedsoyprotein All good stuff. I haven't been through Rockville in (stretch arms out) so long, but my memory of it is that good Peruvian food is extremely easy to find there, such that when I take the family on a trip to DC we stop there on the way back home for ceviche and pollo a la brasa.
"I drank what?" -- Socrates
-
@texturedsoyprotein I see your Rockville, MD and raise you Convoy Street, San Diego https://www.sandiego.org/campaigns/creative-communities/convoy-district.aspx And that before I even get into all of the other awesome food in San Diego!
Mr.Ontop. Keepin' it real since before your were you were born probably.
-
@texturedsoyprotein So....'last meal,' just meaning the last meal you had? The restaurant isn't closing? There are two other ways to take it, neither good.
My niece lives across from there by the train station in one of those new condo buildings. Yutes.....
-
@texturedsoyprotein Still an hour to lunch. You're making me hungry!
-
@texturedsoyprotein said in This is my last meal, from the best mom 'n pop Chinese takeout in my neighborhood (and anywhere else):
You're not going to prison or dying are you???
-
@texturedsoyprotein said in This is my last meal, from the best mom 'n pop Chinese takeout in my neighborhood (and anywhere else):
but back in the day before it got all gentrified
Should have built that wall, yanks.
-
@thomas-donohue @LooseonExit I'm not doing time or dying, I mean this is what I would eat at my last meal, at some point in the hopefully-distant future.
-
@aremmes Peruvian, especially pollo a la brasa, is all over the DC area. One of the OG local chains is Crisp & Juicy. Another longtime Rockville institution is La Limeña Grill.
-
@mr-ontop Convoy District looks good but imagine Rockville as if that were expanded to cover an entire suburb. The kickass food isn't so much concentrated in any one specific area, it's everywhere.
-
@texturedsoyprotein Rockville is one continuous strip mall.
1987 El Camino
2015 Jaguar F-Type V6S -
bougie
Great word. We've got a mom and pop Chinese place about a five minute walk from our house. I have no idea how it ranks, but we like it, and we like that we're supporting the neighborhood business. Not that they need our money, the place is always hopping, mostly with takeout.
When I was playing up in Abilene, we went to an absolute hole in the wall Salvadoran place. It was in a rougher part of town, in a rundown strip mall that I never would have given a second look had I driven by. But the food was out of this world. Whenever we travel, we like to find non-chain places. That's where the best food is.
-
@texturedsoyprotein All of this looks exponentially better than what we get for Chinese food around here. Very jealous.
-
@sovande It's becoming one continuous bougie fake downtown.
-
@texturedsoyprotein Awesome, I'll have to check it out the next time I'm up in Rockville. Our family cemetery (where my grandparents are buried) is up in Clarksburg, which is quickly being absorbed into Rockville.
2018 Buick Regal TourX, 2002 Golf GL TDI, 2013 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid (RIP)
-
Looks wonderful!
We have a restaurant near our home called "Ni Hao" and the cooks are first generation Chinese with their kids running the front. They have a huge Chinese Specialty Menu and they are from Chongqing which has some fantastic spicy food. I'd argue it's as close to China chinese as possible.
-
if you want the best a chinese restaurant has to offer ask the staff what they eat on their breaks and try that. most of time it won’t be on the menu and is a lot simpler in nature.
-
@texturedsoyprotein developers and city council are ruining Alexandria as well. They have built Old Town into a lovely place for out of towners to come spend money, but the changes have zero appreciable benefits to people who live here. It's like they think residents are asking for larger crowds. With the closed off streets and huge crowds it's like Mardi Gras down there. Lines out of bars, people barfing in the streets. But hey, the tax base has been increased. The move to build up the north end of the waterfront is what is going to kill any remaining charm this place had. They are in the process of approving a bunch of large parcels of land to turn into mixed use development. The old coal plant will be housing and stores, they have approved office to condo conversions on the waterfront. It's nuts. It's as though the city feels that the only way to measure progress is by how much green space is destroyed and converted to high end luxury living.
And don't get me started on the problems associated with building apartments as opposed to homes.1987 El Camino
2015 Jaguar F-Type V6S -
@texturedsoyprotein It's only one area, We've got a ridiculous amount of good food here in San Diego, but I'm planning a trip to the east coast next year. I'll put Rockville on the list
Mr.Ontop. Keepin' it real since before your were you were born probably.
-
@hillrat Clarksburg is getting way built up, but Rockville would have to annex Gaithersburg & Germantown first to get there.
-
@kleebrz That's a good tip. Yes these dishes are firmly in the Americanized arena, this is kinda my sentimental favorite since my parents fed us lots of this style of food over the years. But there's not necessarily any secret staff-only items, all that is out in the open on the authentic menu and there's rotating authentic specials stuck up on the wall.
There's a lot of places around here that are authentic first with maybe a little lip service paid to Americanized dishes to keep less adventurous eaters satisfied. Here are some highlights:
Joe's Noodle House
Sichuan Jin River
Xi'an Gourmet
A&J Restaurant
Bob's Shanghai 66
YU Noodles Cafe
Super Bowl Noodle House
East Dumpling House
Jumbo Jumbo Cafe
Wang Manor -
@texturedsoyprotein Damn you man now I want Chinese takeout!
-
@sovande We have no such nightlife-induced problems because there's not much in the way of nightlife thanks to Montgomery County alcohol restrictions. The only part of MoCo where full-on standalone bars that aren't part of restaurants can exist is downtown Bethesda. There are some bar/restaurants here that can get clubby in the evenings but that's more for locals who want to go have some fun and don't feel like going to an actual nightlife-y area.
We do have many mixed use developments here. I'd say the difference is here, the smaller ones without any single family or townhomes are built where other less-dense commercial properties already existed. That's actually exactly what's happening a couple blocks down Rockville Pike from me. A series of old strip malls are being reduced to rubble as we speak. There are other bigger developments with SFHs & THs, and those were mostly built on undeveloped land. But, they all include condos & apartments too, so on the whole they're a lot more dense than the old 1/4-acre lot SFH subdivisions from the 70s-90s.
There's a definite housing shortage and dense development is needed. Yeah it feels a little artificial to have something like that plopped in whole cloth where there's more uniformity to everything vs. a real downtown growing organically, but it does make sense for the area.
-
@mr-ontop I'd say you'd probably want to put DC on the list and maybe hop the subway out here to Rockville for a meal or 2.
-
Moved from Oppositelock by
jminer -
Moved from Archive by jminer
