From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published October , 2007 Golden Dragon 2$ Metairie: 4417 Veterans Blvd. Lunch and dinner continuously, seven days. 887-6081. AE DC DS MC V Chinese. The Golden Dragon is the last gasp of a halcyon age in the Chinese restaurant community in New Orleans. And although it doesn't look like a particularly impressive place, its food still reflects a lot of the excitement we enjoyed in the Chinese restaurants of that time, before the other Asian restaurants started moving in and stealing the Chinese thunder. In the early 1970s, Andy Tsai opened the Dragon's Garden in a little joint on Airline Highway. His menu was a complete departure from the old-style, Americanized Cantonese food that was served universally in New Orleans Chinese restaurants. Tsai introduced hot and sour soup, shrimp toast, fried dumplings, the entire array of Szechuan dishes, moo shu pork, and Peking duck to the city's eaters. Hard to believe that those commonplace dishes weren't around, but they were so revolutionary that they created major buzz. Andy Tsai moved his restaurant twice, winding up on 17th Street at Ridgelake in Metairie, before he retired in the 1980s. The new owners of his second location renamed it the Golden Dragon, and had the good sense to keep the same menu and recipes. And the place just kept on going, not quite as good as the Dragon's Garden, but better than most other Chinese places. The restaurant today is not attractive. It's on the second floor of a building whose first floor hosts a twenty-four hour bar and pool hall. After passing an untidy entrance, you climb the stairs to the restaurant on the second floor. It is reasonably well furnished, but a bit worn out, and some oddities like a Coca-Cola vending box are here and there. The restaurant is owned by Jung Lu Tan, who has run a number of good restaurants around town over the years. I have not seen her there on my recent visits; the place is run by what appears to be an older Chinese family who speak to one another in loudly-spoken Chinese (the matriarch came over to apologize that the patriarch/chef is a little hard of hearing). All of this will ring a bell to anyone who's explored the Chinatowns in San Francisco or New York. There, great restaurants have a way of being in secondary locations, and staffed by first-generation Chinese. I say this to persuade you to close one eye (and ear) to the decidedly non-mainstream environment, and focus on the food. All of the dishes I remember as having been great in the glory days of this restaurant (I'm afraid I'm talking about the late 1970s and early 1980s) are still great. Here are the best shrimp toasts I've had in a long while: piled high with macerated shrimp, fried greaselessly. The fried dumplings are a little clumsy in execution, but lack nothing in flavor. The hot and sour soup goes a little heavy on the cornstarch, but its flavor is marvelously peppery. I am exceptionally pleased to note that the Golden Dragon continues to perform authentic stir-fry where appropriate. An alarming number of Chinese restaurants are cooking most dishes by just throwing the proteins into the deep-fryer, and tossing them for a minute or two in a wok with the vegetables. I wouldn't call this brilliant stir-frying, but it's still beats the sameness of the deep-fried fakes. The great dishes here are Szechuan, known for its peppery cooking. The sauteed Szechaun pork, shrimp or chicken are particularly good, with not only a good punch of red pepper but also no small amount of garlic. The pork with hot cabbage and the River Shang pork--the latter a great old dish I see almost nowhere anymore--are also marvelous. Moo-shu pork has always been a specialty at the Golden Dragon. It's made with matchsticks of meat with several mushrooms, tiger lily petals, and egg flowers, and eaten by spooning it on what amount to flour tortillas and rolling them up. (They're a whole lot like burritos, but with a totally different flavor.) The service staff is accommodating enough. Prices are quite low, and the portions are too big to finish. The Golden Dragon could use some sprucing up, but it's still one of the better Chinese kitchens in the city. This was a restaurant in the 2007 Top Sixty Ethnic Restaurant Countdown. To view the entire list, click here. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.