Best Chinese I've ever had at China Pavillion in Seattle, WA

 
There are a lot of things I don't miss about Seattle, but the "House Special Chow Mein" at the China Pavillion in Seattle was the best ever Chinese for me.  It is on Pacific Highway South around 148th Street.
 
 
 

 
 
 

 That looks like it came from a mall food court.

or a buffet

This makes me convinced that Chinese food is going to the wayside.  It has become too standardized, Americanized and boring-ized.  Last night I went to a Noodle House with all the usual suspects on the menu.  Thank god they had Pad Thai on the menu @ $7.95.  It was pretty good. I was concerned that the price was too low for good Pad Thai but it was flavorful and had plenty of shrimp.

Right next door is a very good restaurant which serves truly authentic regional food from China. You can find many dishes that no American would put in their mouth.

mark

It not only looks standardized, it looks oily. 
 
That's not to say oil has no place in Chinese food.  Shanghai-style cuisine is supposed to be oily, of course.  But this kind of pseudo-Cantonese food always leaves me feeling slightly ill.
 
As I've said before on other threads, I still love old-fashioned "Chinese-American" food.  I just ate at two purveryors of this in the Indianapolis area last week:  Lotus Garden in Greenwood, and Hong Kong Inn at 38th and Franklin in Indianapolis.  These places have been around for many years, are still family-owned, still have a page or two of tropical tiki-style drinks in their menus, and offer what I'd consider to be the "classics" of this kind of restaurant, including chow meins (both regular and Cantonese-style), chop suey, egg foo young, egg rolls, rumaki, etc.  They also have the standards like Hung Yin Gai Ding (chicken almong ding), Moo Goo Gai Pan, butterfly shrimp, etc.   Some of these dishes are adaptations of genuine Cantonese food, and some are purely American inventions.   But in both restaurants, the quality is very high and the service is good (even though Hong Kong Inn is in a strip mall, it's a sit-down restaurant).
 
I am not ashamed to say that I love them.
 
I've been to mainland China and Hong Kong, and I agree that authentic Chinese regional cuisines are wonderful culinary experiences.  They are hard to find in the United States and Canada, but can sometimes be located in "Chinatowns" in the major cities, and are well worth searching out.
 
Mall, food court, and buffet "Chinese" restaurants, where you shovel the food into a plastic box?    No thanks!  I won't waste my time.  

Ugh, does everywhere else have egg in their fried rice?  All of the Chinese food I grew up with never had eggs, but seems like everywhere else does.

Authentic, schmathentic, I'd be all over that. It looks delicious.

The stuff on the left looks like lo mein, and the stuff on the right looks like fried rice.  Where's the chow mein?

Looks good, though!

I been to some really good genuine Cantonese Chinese restaurants in Seattle but, they never served anything resembling what's pictured above.

enginecapt


Authentic, schmathentic, I'd be all over that. It looks delicious.

 

Ahh, but only cold for breakfast left over from last night's delivery.

enginecapt


Authentic, schmathentic, I'd be all over that. It looks delicious.

you're right enginecapt, I would too

rumaki
 


I've been to mainland China and Hong Kong, and I agree that authentic Chinese regional cuisines are wonderful culinary experiences.  They are hard to find in the United States and Canada, but can sometimes be located in "Chinatowns" in the major cities, and are well worth searching out. 
 

 
That was completely true up to 10-15 years ago.  Now days some of the most authentic Chinese regional cuisine can be found in middle to upper-middle class suburbs of major cites, where large numbers of affluent Chinese have settled.   Plano, Richardson, Sugar Land TX, San Francisco Peninsula, SF South Bay, a whole string of suburbs East of LA, etc.
 
I’m not saying all suburban Chinese restaurants are authentic.  Here in Plano there are probably 40 or so Chinese places, about 10 or so are authentic.  The best way to tell is just look at the customers.  If they are mostly Chinese and speaking Chinese it is probably authentic, if the customers are mostly “Foreign Devils” it probably isn’t.  However, there are places that have separate authentic and non-authentic menus.  In those you have to demand the authentic menu since it is less profitable because it is prepared by the higher paid chiefs.        
 

I see Chinese-American and authentic Chinese cuisines as two separate categories, and I have favorites in both. Sometimes there's nothing quite like a dish of flavorful Sesame Chicken or General Tsao's Chicken or Orange Beef.... Other times I'm really in the mood for a delicious Crispy Duck or Salt and Pepper Squid or Dim Sum or something else truly exotic.... It's all good when well prepared and flavorful.  The pics above look pretty good, but the oiliness and styrofoam don't work much for me. Also, the dishes need some pot stickers next to them!

Well, it's good. Authentic and Americanised are not very similar, and that can be applied to many different cuisines.

I am moer apt to got for authentic, however, I can appreciate a more Americanised, or Canadianised approach to it as well.

Bottom line, it has to taste good.

Rice does not photograph well. Especially with a small digital camera. If the poster said it tasted good I believe. I hate what I call Bucket Chineese where they take 1 scoop from bucket 2 and 2 scoops from bucket 6 and 1 from bucket 4. Then throw it into a Wok and call it Combo 17...Russ