What’s this? There is a Chinese restaurant around the corner called Fortune Cookie? They deliver? They have 4 stars with about 80 something reviews on Yelp? We decided to take a chance. Now, Fortune Cookie is what I call slutty Chinese. Why slutty you may ask? Because it is Americanized Chinese. You know the type – sweet sauces, fried spring rolls, lo mein, etc. The kind of stuff we grew up eating before we were introduced to Tasty China and Danny Ting’s deft hand. We ordered our childhood standards – orange beef, lo mein, egg foo young, beef and broccoli, spring rolls and some other stuff. Would yo believe me if I tell you it was good? Like, we couldn’t stop talking about how good it was and were already plotting our next order as we stood around the kitchen counter devouring the mix of dishes we packed into our enormous bowls. Yeah, some things could be a tad less sweet or saucy, but we can deal for a little convenience and comfort food. We have a Chinese restaurant that delivers and is good. Color me complete. Scroll down to see my awesomely bad pictures of the dishes.

Beef and broccoli

Egg foo young

Veggie lo mein

Orange beef

Sticky rice.

Shrimp stuffed eggplant.

Shrimp stuffed peppers.

Shrimp rice noodle (yes, more shrimp).

Beef balls.

Shrimp and chive dumplings.

The restaurant had posters everywhere advertising dungeness crab everywhere and Moon just can’t resist it. So, we got ginger and scallion forgetting what a pain this dish is to eat.

The flavor and freshness, however, was spot on.

The only other dish we ordered off the menu: Chinese broccoli with garlic.

Excellent.

Verdict: Bliss approved dim-sum served every day (if memory serves me correctly – call ahead because I am deep in pregnancy stupidity). Get there now and go often because Chinese chefs are notoriously wayward.

Reopening a restaurant with a new owner and chef while keeping the same name, look, and style of cuisine is a risky proposition no matter where you fall on the dining spectrum. That’s exactly what the owner of the “new” Cafe 101 (5412 Buford Highway, Doraville, 770-458-8399) has done. Once the darling of critics and food lovers alike, the old Cafe 101 — whose reviews still grace the restaurant’s entrance — received a less-than-stellar health inspection score and, after months of decreased quality, closed. The new Cafe 101 is led by a Taiwanese chef/owner who hails from Los Angeles. Though much of the menu seems familiar — including the handful of Szechuan dishes — this incarnation’s energy has clearly been renewed.

The smaller plates hold the most interest. One such dish, the Taiwanese-style fried chicken, is virtuously greaseless with bite-sized pieces of white- and dark-meat chicken encased in a batter as light as tempura and fried to a beautiful crisp. A little dish of ground chili with the tiniest hint of smoke arrives alongside the chicken to scatter on for a little heat. Add it in increments or you’ll be coughing for a good five minutes. Pork wontons swimming in a sour-and-spicy bowl of sauce are tender, fresh-tasting and remain intact when plucked from the small bowl with chopsticks. Less successful or desirable dishes like the “green pea cake” — a gelatinous white substance made, chilled and formed into cubes, then draped in a spicy sauce — sound interesting enough, but fall flat.

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A lot of my colleagues and friends have different opinions on whether or not they like this restaurant. Others are fascinated or annoyed by Cheng’s movements and alliances. I honestly don’t care if he intends to open another restaurant in cities x, y, or z. If Tasty China was any indication of how he could train a staff and maintain a certain level of highly acceptable quality, who cares if he’s in Virginia?

On this particular Saturday, Cheng was making the rounds and cooking in the kitchen. I was permitted to go back and get a few snapshots of him doing his thing after we ate our meal. He had no idea who I was and probably didn’t care, which only made me love him more.

Now, on to what we ate. I found every dish to be exceptional–even the lo mein that one of our less adventurous companions ordered. The crystal shrimp, which is not pictured, was a perfect mil counterpoint for the more spicy dishes.

My favorite dish of the day:

The hot and numbing tofu rolls.

Litmus dish: dry-fried eggplant. More crunchy than I’ve had in the past, but still a flavor bomb of deliciousness.

Sauteed pumpkin.

Shan City chicken: definitely different than it has been in the past. Less bready, more chewy. Super spicy. Awesome.

Chicken with ginger. A dish I found myself going back to for more and more due to its balance of mild heat, sharp ginger pop, and tender pieces of white meat.

Verdict: Another stellar Szechuan restaurant for our seemingly saturated city. Service is excellent. However, the price point may be a barrier for some. There’s always the original Tasty China if that’s the case.

In a time when most Chinese restaurant menus resemble phone books, it sure is refreshing to see some focus. Te Wei Chinese Kabobs (5090 Buford Highway, Doraville. 770-455-8388) specializes in the Chinese Muslim street food “chuanr,” grilled and skewered kabobs. Most of the ingredients used — vegetables, seafood, meats, you name it — are seasoned with cumin, chili flakes, salt and sesame, and practically everything is covered in sesame seeds. Probably my favorite kabob at Te Wei is the “fish tofu.” It’s a rectangle of tofu brushed with a sweet sauce and cooked until it almost resembles a tofu doughnut with sweet, fishy undertones. Sounds weird, but trust me on this one.

What I thought was Chinese sausage on a stick is actually a regular American hot dog manipulated with a knife to look like a totem pole, and treated the same as the other meat kabobs. My dining companion, a hot-dog lover, proclaimed it “the most delicious hot dog ever.” It was. Huge chicken wings, also covered in the same sauce and sprinkled with sesame seeds, remain juicy after their time on the grill. None of the kabobs costs more than $2. Some, like the quail eggs, chicken hearts and most of the vegetables, are only 50 cents. Add a bowl of soup and some dumplings and you have a relatively healthy and shockingly inexpensive meal that’s big on flavor and interest.

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Like any cuisine, Sichuan lends itself to a variety of styles depending on the chef. Many of us first tasted its telltale ma-la (hot and numbing) flavors at Tasty China under the helm of Peter Chang. But it’s only appropriate that newcomers would step onto the scene to give us more choices and spicy variations. Gu’s Bistro (5750-A Buford Highway, Doraville, 770-451-8118) — one such newcomer — opened a little more than a month ago in the space that formerly housed Chong Qing Hot Pot.The man behind the spice is chef Gu, a purported Chengdu native who used to cook at Sichuan House in Johns Creek. Along with his daughter Yvonne, Gu has already cultivated quite the following among Atlantans, so the restaurant is usually packed at lunchtime.

The thing that makes Gu’s goods stand apart is how clean the food tastes. There’s seldom too much of any component be it spice, salt or MSG. The “traditional menu” is immense and there are normally a few specials on the chalkboard at the front of the restaurant. Yes, there’s an “American menu” for the unadventurous palates out there, but c’mon — why bother?

There’s a long list of small bites, each a little more mysterious than the one before it. A little advice: The names don’t always reflect what you’ll be eating, for better or worse. Case in point, the Salt & Pepper Hair Tail, which is chunks of strongly flavored — and very bony — fish, coated in a light batter and fried. Other starters are more straightforward, like the seriously chewy shreds of homemade beef jerky doused in red chili oil and smothered with white sesame seeds.

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Hot and sour dumplings

Chong Qing Cuisine & Hot Pot (5750-A Buford Highway, Doraville, 770-457-1994) sits in a strip mall that’s seen better days. The massive parking lot is eerily empty despite several nearby stores. Entering the restaurant does little to dispel the misgivings of even the most happily curious eaters. A railroad-car-shaped room is peppered with prefabricated booths, tables, and a few choice nooks with precarious stairs (watch your step). The lack of décor is shocking even by Buford Highway standards.

The food, however, is alive with color, spice and variety. Chong Qing — which is not related to the Chong Qing in the Chinatown Food Court — specializes in Szechuan cuisine, a style of cooking most Atlantans stopped searching for on Buford Highway when chef Peter Chang landed in Marietta. It’s an odd thing, really, that it’s hard to find really good Szechuan on Buford Highway with the many Chinese establishments that line the corridor. The Szechuan you do find mostly falls into Little Szechuan territory: dumbed down and past its prime.

Chong Qing isn’t dumbing down a thing. The restaurant has been open a little over a month according to our waitress, who seems to be the only waitress ever in the establishment. The young, attractive girl with the impeccably liquid lined eyes will do her best to help you out despite her limited English. She won’t steer you away from dishes you may want to try. Want the home-style bullfrog or diced rabbit with pickled chili pepper or pork trotters with red dates? Have at it.

In fact, adventurous eaters will have plenty of ground to cover on the menu, which holds about 15 sections. The namesake hot pots come in categories: light soup pot, hot and spicy pot, and pot with spicy and light soup. At $4.95, the hot pots appear to be a good deal, but it adds up once you start choosing from the long list of vegetables, seafood, “meat and others,” and soy products. You can make a meal of the hot pots, though there are more satisfying things on the menu — especially if you easily tire of dunking chicken claws into bland liquids and dipping them into a chalky sesame-paste-based sauce.

Sour and hot pork dumplings arrive in broth swimming with chilies, roasted peppercorns and chili oil. They’re so tender the tangy filling spills out of the dumpling skins the moment they’re plucked with chopsticks. Use a spoon. Meat dumplings in spicy sauce also arrive in a bowl, but these dumplings are flatter and firmer. Coat them with a slick of the spicy sesame-seed-laden sauce and eat them in one bite. They are worth a visit alone.

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Another dreary, rainy day had me craving some comfort in the form of Chef Liu’s sesame paste noodles and pork dumplings. However, I stopped short (read: almost caused a major accident) when I saw my beloved and sadly departed Wan Lai had been replaced by a new spot: Coco’s Chinese restaurant (4897 Buford Highway, Suite 104
Chamblee, GA 30341). Coco’s serves Cantonese cuisine and has many of the same dishes–such as casserole rice–as Wan Lai, but they are unaffiliated. The interior feels much warmer than Wan Lai did for some reason. Maybe it’s the fish tank? Who knows. Since I was flying solo, I only ordered two dishes: beef chow fun and garlic snow pea shoots.

The chow fun was good. The kitchen uses very wide noodles and the dish has a pleasant amount of grease. I do, however, wish they’d use more black beans and tenderize the meat a bit more. It was still very flavorful.

The garlic snow pea shoots were great. Not overcooked, super fresh, and a generous portion.

The interior is littered with pictures of Americanized dishes, but it seems there are more treasure worth discovering given this awesome looking poster on the door.

Stay tuned for more on the blog and a full review in a couple of weeks (they’ve only been open two) in Creative Loafing.

Chinese chefs are notoriously nomadic, bouncing from one restaurant to the next without apparent cause, and nobody embodies this stereotype more than the enigmatic and wildly revered Peter Chang. When Chang popped up on the Atlanta restaurant scene at Tasty China (585 Franklin Road, Marietta, 770-419-9849) in 2006, food fiends went mad for his intoxicatingly ma-la (hot and numbing) Szechuan dishes. They’d suck air into their mouths to kill the burn and wipe their damp brows in between bites, only to return days later for more gastrointestinal masochism. But the chef suddenly left Atlanta just months later and landed somewhere in Tennessee. Or was it Washington D.C.? Virginia?

As they’d been doing for years, Chang devotees filled forums around the country with sightings and rumors about the chef’s latest whereabouts. However, as soon as he appeared — poof! — he’d vanish. Chang’s fugitive-like movements caught the attention of the New Yorker and the Oxford American, which published similar pieces about the mysterious and talented chef around the same time. The coverage only built his fans’ fervor. Fanatics wanted to know: Where in the world is Peter Chang?

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