From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published March 23, 2007 Five Happiness 2$ Mid-City: 3605 S. Carrollton 482-3935 Lunch and dinner seven days. AE DC DS MC V www.fivehappiness.com One of these days I'm going to create an Importance Index for restaurants, measuring how essential an eatery is to its customers. When I do, the Five Happiness will score extremely high. Maybe in the top ten among all New Orleans restaurants. The avid interest in the Five Happiness didn't abate even after it reopened, about eight months after the storm. It did so in its banquet facility, across the street from the main restaurant. Which had major roof damage to fix. So, even though owner Peggy Lee operated the Five Happiness with a full menu in the temporary quarters, the question of when the "real" Five Happiness would reopen kept on coming. The interest is easy to understand. With what may be the most central location in the metropolitan area, this place may be in the top ten among sit-down restaurants in the number of people it serves in a day. It gets Uptowners, everybody in Mid-City and the Carrollton sections, from all income levels. It's quite convenient to Old Metairie, too. All were ecstatic when the main restaurant reopened last October. The enthusiasm has not waned. Last Tuesday I had an early (five-thirty) dinner at Five Happiness. By the time the second of my three courses arrived, both dining rooms were full. By the time I left, at least twenty people were standing around, waiting for tables. The new Five Happiness is sleek. Gone forever (from this and most other Chinese restaurants) are the paper lanterns, bright red and painted gold surfaces, and images of dragons and such. It has a subtle Asian feel, but any other kind of restaurant could move right in with no changes. When the Five Happiness took over the long-running How Toy restaurant in 1978, it installed a menu purveyed by only a handful of the nearly 100 (really!) other local Chinese restaurants of the time. To the familiar Cantonese dishes, they added Szechuan and Mandarin dishes. They were good at it, too, and that started the crowds coming--even though lots of those people continued to eat the chop suey and fried rice. This is not an issue with Peggy Lee. Her restaurant caters to its customers' tastes. The list of chef's specialties is dominated by dishes that include chicken and pork and beef and shrimp--as in all of the above. We rarely mix so many different meats in any other kind of cooking, but Chinese restaurants give us permission to indulge that peculiar need to have it all. (Even though it's clear that everything is less preferable to something in particular.) One other customer preference is for very low prices. The Five Happiness gives them that, too. This place is still a major bargain. The overwhelming majority of entrees are under $15, with quite a few under $10. And that's not with either smell portions or second-rate ingredients, as we will see. I've always had the impression that the Five Happiness has the capability of serving much better food than it does, but its enormous volume prevents it from doing so. Example: I started my Tuesday dinner with the chicken salad with savory sauce. This is a dish I like a lot, one not widely served: sliced chilled chicken tossed with greens and a brown sauce that tastes of nuts, pepper, soy, and a little sweetness. It tasted great, but the thick sauce was just dumped on top. How much better this would have been if the salad had been tossed with the sauce, and of the chicken and greens had been chopped just a little finer! Indeed, I have seen this place turn out food of stunning excellence. The best Peking duck of my life was served here. But most of the time they're too busy, too eager to get people served quickly, and too inexpensive to go all the way with the finesse. Most of the menu will be familiar to fans of Chinese restaurants. You start with pot stickers (the standard pork-filled ones, as well as the unique vegetable-stuffed dumplings), shrimp toast (maybe the best around), crab rangoon (crabmeat and Philadelphia cream cheese in a wonton--I never did understand this dish), and the combo platters with the flame in the midele and meats on skewers. And that chicken salad, which I highly recommend, big enough for two. The soups are decent. The best is the seafood soup for two, which is not something we see in many Chinese places (although it's standard in Vietnamese and Thai restaurants). The shrimp with sizzling rice soup is made with tomato, which is a marginal combo for me (I don't like shrimp Creole, either). But I liked it anyway, with its clearly fine shrimp and bamboo shoots. Let's look at that sizzling rice. It's like freshly-fried Rice Krispies, and for some reason is a passion along the Carrollton corridor. In its most dramatic form--the sizzling go-ba--it's on the plate when a combination of chicken, shrimp and beef in their slightly-sweet sauce gets dumped over it at the table. This sends up a cloud of steam and a brief blast of sizzle, and everybody loves the spectacle. The eye likes it more than the palate, but it's not bad. They can do much better than that, though. The claypot of braised tofu with chicken and roasted pork, mushrooms, onions, and a full-flavored sauce is an uncommon dish hereabouts. I asked for it to be made spicy. It was easily enough for two people, came out very hot but with nothing overcooked, and was just delicious. Another specialty is the whole fish--a drum, I think, but good and fresh and elemental. that's the real food. Almost all the remainder of the menu is standards: General Tso's chicken, kung pau this and that, mu shu this and that, Szechuan this and that. And the old-timey stuff, like Mandarin chicken, chow mein, lo mein, egg foo yung, and everything else for those who haven't altered their Chinese order in three decades.  The service staff is geared to fast service. No dinner I've had there recently lasted more than an hour, even with three courses. Here's how they did it: when I was halfway through the chicken salad, the soup came. When I was halfway through the soup, the entree came. No doubt that brings happinesses to the management and the people waiting for tables, but next time I will ask them to slow down. Click here to return to today's edition. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.