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A giant gaping maw of mediocre Chinese food

David runs down all the Chinese restaurants within three miles of Out of Town News, finds all of them lacking. Mary Chung, he notes, is just outside his Circle of Desolation:

It's 3.2 miles along Mass Ave - give or take – between Mary Chung and Qing Dao Garden, and as far as I'm concerned, there’s not much to eat Chinese-wise along that strip, which encompasses three of the major squares of Cambridge. Sort of disgraceful, don't you think? ...

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Comments

3.2 diameter... Well actually it's more just a linear length, just using mass ave

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Math was never my strong suit. Fixed, thanks.

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I think people will disagree with me, but I'm no huge fan of the asian food here in Roslindale. Probably there's one supplier for all the restaurants. Same tired stuff over and over again.

Had better luck with the Thai restos. Phuket Thai has a Yum Nuah beef salad that kicks.

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Golden House, of course.

Other than that, meh. Ditto for West Roxbury and Hyde Park (hmm, and JP, too? Is there anything there besides that one little place on Centre Street?).

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JP has Charlie Chan's on Center Street, Food Wall in Hyde Square and I think it's called Great Wall near the Monument. I wouldn't advise eating at any of them sober.

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There's also the Joy Rice China Cafe (I think that's the full name) across from the English High fields near Doyle's. Great tofu dishes and nice nice people.

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Yeah, how could I forget them! Great chicken fingers (kidlet and I have stopped there a couple times for those), bizarre collection of stuff on the walls (Chinese landscapes coupled with photos of old pick-up trucks) and, yes, nice people. They need to get a working heating system, though :-).

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My sister and her family, who live in JP near the monument, always travel to Roslindale for their Chinese take-out fix. Golden House is definitely good, but it is kind of sad that JP doesn't have at least one decent takeout joint.

Oh, and by the way, I think you mean radius in your headline if you mean that you have to travel 3 miles in any direction from Harvard Square. If diameter is correct, then the any direction should be cut to 1.5 miles.

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Yes, the radius from Out of Town News is 1.5 miles or less - it is actually less than that distance to Mary Chung's, for instance.

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Giant gaping maw!

True, it's a bit redundant, but I guess you just can't have your pi and eat it, too.

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It is a 3 mile (or 5km) diameter BUFFER.

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I thought it was a 3-mile BUFFET. Now that would be something.

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I think if we added up the lenghth of all the buffet runs in this single fabulous chinese place, it would amount to 5km!

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Apparently you're talking about the entire length of Spadina Av.

All this talk, I'm going to pick up some Bun Thit Heo Nu'ong (fried pork, spring roll, vermicelli noodle and salad + ouster sauce) from Le's on the way home. Can't get enough of this dish.

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Golden House -- subpar Panda Express-style fare for gweilos with low expectations. I've lived near the monument for a few years now and stopped hitting Golden House after my first visit. It's a straight, suburban-style Americanized Chinese joint that doesn't seem to realize it's located in a major city and may need to stay open oh, two hours or so later.

While Great Wall and Charlie Chan's are inedible even by that low standard, JP has a great little place called Food Wall in Hyde Square. It's easy, and not unfair, to write this place off as a fry factory for the Behan drunks, but their menu is enormous and dishes like the curry dumplings and other vegetarian/vegan offerings make them a lot more enticing than most American Chinese places.

As for the Mary Chung discussion, he seems to have applied the most arbitrary set of rules to his argument that he could. Living in a neighborhood actually requires turning left or right off of the main drag every so often. Disqualifying or dismissing eateries off of Mass Ave may be making your search for "good" local Chinese food a lot more difficult than it needs to be. Shrugging off Royal East was a great way to undermine the thesis.

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I'm no foodie, but Golden House is way above the other places in Roslindale (Imperial Kitchen, anyone?). Maybe that's not saying much, but it works for us.

Sub-par Panda Express? Yeesh, that's just wrong. I've eaten at Panda Expresses (you don't know how low you can get until you've eaten at a Panda Express in a highway "oasis" outside Chicago on Christmas Eve) and there's just no comparison. I'd even take Imperial Kitchen over one of those.

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Has anyone here ever checked out Triple Eatery on Cummins Highway?

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I can see the Triple Eatery from my kitchen. We went there once for take out, on New Years Eve, and never again! Welcoming the New Year by nonstop retching? No thank you.

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...that we are not missing any essential Roslindale dining experience.

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Food is reliably fresh. Will have to try Golden House...

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but it's not clear that the blogger knows this, since he didn't make any mention of wandering down Cambridge Street.

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... near Inman Square -- but there certainly are a good number of other sorts of nice (ethnic-food) restaurants. ;~}

There used to be (decades ago) lots of restaurants in the area serving very good Portuguese food. I wonder how many of these remain.

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I mentioned another good Chinese restaurant, Mu Lan, that's over in Kendall Square but on Broadway instead of Main or Mass Ave. David pointed out in response in his comments that he was going for the theme of Mass Ave (and Main around Kendall), so yeah, he wouldn't have gone down Cambridge St in his survey for this particular post.

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Different style, perhaps, but still good lunch specials and great for large tables of people.

He does mention this, but kind of waves it off. I think the dishes that they offer that others do not are what make this place more interesting.

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Ron, where are these good Chinese places on Cambridge street? I think there's one called Guangzhou just East of Inman, but I don't know how good it is. So far the best suggestions off Mass ave are Zoe's and Mu Lan.

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Worst name ever, but I remember it being pretty OK when I lived in Central, though I may have been inebriated at the time.

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Pu Pu is on Centre Street in West Roxbury. It must be compensating for the other Chinese takeout place on the street, which has the most boring name imaginable: West Garden.

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