Little Chinatown
Anecdotes & Analysis
While Vietnamese and Thai restaurants enriched the New Orleans dining-out market, during the past decade or two have been an era of overall decline for their Chinese counterparts. With some exceptions, the competition in the city's oldest Asian category has not been about quality or innovation but convenience and price. Most Chinese restaurants do much more take-out business than eat-in. And the portions served are clearly the main attraction--with the buffets being the worst. But a few (very few) newer Chinese places have advanced the cuisine, with a simple and welcome strategy. Instead of serving the highly-Americanized eats than most other Chinese places do, these have added a lot of dishes more in tune with the appetites of Asians. Some of these offerings are so exotic that the servers warn round-eye people that they might not like, say, the chicken with lots of bones still attached. (As I was told when I ordered half of a boiled chicken, served intentionally cold.) But that sort of experience is exciting for those of us with inquisitive palates. And Little Chinatown is the best of this new wave.
Backstory
The Little Chinatown opened in late 2011, taking over a building immediately recognizable as a former Pizza Hut. It's immediately next door to Kased Brothers' Halal Meats and the Shishkebab House, making this a hot spot for the kind of ethnic eating that have grown agreeable on the northern part of William Boulevard in Kenner.
Dining Room
One big L-shaped room with a mix of booths and four-top tables. In the early days, a glassed-in cabinet filled with sides of pork and ducks, aging in the classic Chinese way. (That apparatus has since gone away. Too bad.) The young staff is young, Asian, personable, and accent-free anglophone. I asked for advice and got it, without being regarded as an uninterested suburbanite.
Why It's Essential
Enough Asians live in the Kenner area that Little Chinatown has a ready market for its emphatically Chinese food. Many tables--including those populated by young adults--conduct their conversations in Chinese, or whatever that language they're speaking is. While that is no guarantee of goodness, when you see Asian people clearly excited by what they're eating, you've likely found the real deal.
Why It's Good
When a new Asian cuisine shows up in town, you can always tell which restaurants serve it by the lengths of their menus. The longer, the better. Little Chinatown has about a hundred dishes, about a third of which will likely be new to you unless you're Chinese yourself. Such dishes appear throughout the. Of particular note are the terrific claypot dishes, congee. (The latter is a sort of porridge that is the Chinese parallel of shrimp and grits.) Enough popular local dishes--including the bad ones like Mandarin chicken--are are here that the unadventuresome will find something they will feel secure about ordering.
Most Interesting Dishes
<em><strong>Starters</strong></em> Chicken lettuce wrap Summer rolls Pot stickers Dumpling soup Hot and sour soup Sizzling jasmine rice soup Crabmeat and fish maw soup Chinese chopped chicken salad ~ <em><strong>Entrees</strong></em> Congee (pork, fish, abalone, duck, preserved egg, on porridge) Peking duck Half roasted duck Salt & pepper quail or frog legs Pad Thai Singapore noodles Sesame, orange, or honey chicken Salt roasted shrimp, squid or beef with hot garlic sauce Orange beef Mongolian beef Steamed whole fish Stir-fried conch with yellow leeks Clay pot stewed duck, beef, or goat Clay pot of seafood and tofu House tofu with vegetables
Deficiencies
The menu could do with explanations of the various dishes. All it shows are the names.
For Best Results
Go there as soon as you can. Already I see an encroaching American tilt in the menu. (Logically enough, because most people order what they know, which would not be the pork intestine.)
Bonus Ratings
2
Attitude
2
Hipness
1
Service
3
Value