How to tell a good Asian Restaurant by Ali Wong

Excerpted from her book "Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, and Advice for Living Your Best Life"

Korean: Good: The waitresses cut your food with scissors without asking your permission

I've always based a good Chinese restaurant on how good the General Tso's chicken is. As for Thai, if I get a fair amount of chicken with the pad Thai and I ask for Thai spicy and they deliver on that I'm sold on it.

Pauly wrote:I've always based a good Chinese restaurant on how good the General Tso's chicken is. As for Thai, if I get a fair amount of chicken with the pad Thai and I ask for Thai spicy and they deliver on that I'm sold on it.

If they don’t have Botan rice candy then walk away.

Pauly wrote:I've always based a good Chinese restaurant on how good the General Tso's chicken is.

I sure hope you are only doing this for more American Chinese places, and not actual authentic Chinese restaurants considering the dish is foreign to 99.9% of people in China.

I will not presume to speak for the other Asian ethnicities, but I can usually judge a good Chinese joint when I see one. Is the place:

Full of Chinese people? Good.
Full of old Chinese people? Better.
Old Chinese people gambling, drinking, and yelling? Even better.

As for a litmus test dish, simple stir-fried greens with garlic will indicate skill in the kitchen - pea shoots (do miao), yam leaves (fan shu ye) or water spinach (kong xin cai). Are the greens tender crisp, lightly sauced with cornstarch, with a nice blast of wok hei? If so, the kitchen knows what they're doing.

Eating while Walking wrote

Full of Chinese people? Good.
Full of old Chinese people? Better.
Old Chinese people gambling, drinking, and yelling? Even better.

Thanks for the good advice. I figured out the first rule by myself, but wasn't aware of the other two.

Even just the first rule helps a lot. Thanks to using it I was lucky enough to stumble into a Hunan restaurant on Kearny Street in San Francisco. This was back in the early 70s and I was on a business assignment in SF.

The place was a hole in the wall and I just sat down at the counter. The fellow next to me was Taiwanese and we had a nice chat while enjoying some blazing hot food.

I'd add

Old Chinese people gambling, drinking, smoking, and yelling? Best.

(regardless of local laws)

May with her beehive at her restaurant in rural Illinois, Mattoon; Hunan Cafe'. She was back and front of house(she put her daughter through college from the profits of this enterprise after her husband died), some of the best Midwest Chinese American food ever. Even better than the restaurant situated above my favorite record shop at my university, the restaurant was China Fortune in Athens, Ohio. We traveled to Mattoon from Casey, IL to visit my partner's relatives. After a visit, eventually we arrived in a rather desolate strip mall by the train station. We always hung out with our friends running a great used book store then would go to May's place where the platonic wonton soup awaited and her possibly Dunlop approved kung pao wanted plating as May did every dish and server workforce all at once.