San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
The city’s Top 10 Chinese restaurants show range
At Chow Soon, sesame seeds floated like constellations across a syrupy orange sky over ragged peaks of sweet-and-sour pork. That’s about all I remember from my first Chinese restaurant experience, growing up in the suburban wilds of Fort Worth. My Chinese horizons have expanded since then. To noodles sliced in a jerky ballet by a robot chef at the China Shandong Hotel in Kathmandu. To fish-maw soup in San Francisco’s Chinatown. To Cantonese pickled pork hot enough to bring tears at the Guangzhou airport in Southern China. And to cumin duck at Sichuan House in San Antonio.
Chinese food has adapted to the American experience the same way Americans have come to embrace Chinese food without the hyphen-America part. Doesn’t mean we’ve left it behind. Among the more than 150 Chinese restaurants in San Antonio, most of them lean toward the comfort-food standards of Chinese-American cooking, the orange chicken and the broccoli beef, the General Tso’s chicken and the sweet-and-sour everything. I’m there a couple of times a month. Welcome to Ding How, may I take your order please?
Others find their strength with regional Chinese cooking, the way Mian Noodles & Dumplings flies the flag of the Shanxi province and Sichuan cooking stakes a claim — and a name — at some of the best Chinese restaurants in San Antonio.
And some find a comfortable balance in-between, with one menu for Chinese-American, another for Chinese. You just have to ask, like at Phoenix Chinese Cafe, with a separate menu that stretches more than 115 dishes long. Or maybe they’re shuffled together, like at the Houston export Tiger’s, with a mix of Sichuanese, Taiwanese and ChineseAmerican dishes sharing the