Tag: Chinese food

Fan Zhang, owner of the popular Buford Highway restaurant Northern China Eatery, often sees one-to-two-hour waits for his restaurant’s authentic Chinese fare. With the opening of spin-off the Dumpling Factory in June, he hopes to make the food more accessible to metro Atlantans. Set to replace Boxcar Betty’s in Westside Paper, the Dumpling Factory will serve highlights from Northern China Eatery’s menu.

A new Chinese hotpot restaurant opens in Duluth on February 24. Called Xi Hotpot, it pays homage to Chongqing in China’s Sichuan province. Offering an a la carte menu with 95 items, Xi Hotpot features classic Sichuan flavors like mala (numbing spice), fresh meats, and offal.

What is authentic Chinese food? Regardless of how you define it, just know you can find excellent Chinese in Atlanta from Gu’s Kitchen in Chamblee to Golden Buddha in Buckhead.

With gold accents and shimmering flower chandeliers, Royal China's new space in Duluth literally shines. Arrive early to beat the crowds for excellent dim sum.

The best part of Jusgo Supermarket in Duluth is the food court, a quick study of regional Chinese cuisines. Craft your own Sichuan-style dry hot pots at Uncle Zhu, and try Cantonese barbecue at BBQ Corner.

The most global culinary destination in Gwinnett, the metro area’s most international county, at first glance looks like a typical American food court. But the bazaar inside Duluth’s Assi Plaza brings together the cuisines of Korea, China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, the Philippines, and Peru under one roof. Compared to the other Asian hypermarkets—Super H Mart, Great Wall Supermarket, and Mega Mart—opened in recent years along Pleasant Hill Road, Assi (which launched in 2009) delivers the most cross-cultural reach. In its food court, counters with attractive, uniform signage face a common dining area with wood-grain, laminated tables grouped on a linoleum floor that draws the eye with its sunny colors. Every vendor posts backlit pictures of staggeringly diverse menu items.

A decade ago, Atlanta's Chinese food scene went through a tantalizing phase in which Buford Highway restaurant owners would constantly lure away each other's best dim sum cooks, who swapped loyalties like a culinary Game of Thrones. Out of those competitive switcheroos came impeccably fresh dumplings and other snacky tidbits wheeled through large dining rooms on jangling, tempting carts.

For ages the most famous restaurant in Johns Creek, the golf-obsessed town in north Fulton County where office parks and subdivisions define the landscape, was Sia’s. The eclectic bistro mirrored the fusion cuisine fashionable in 1990s Buckhead. Sia’s closed quietly last year, and its space turned into a Persian buffet, one example of how the population—and the dining scene—has become increasingly international.

When I think of Peter Cheng, I imagine him in his tall, white chef's hat, walking down the road alone like Bill Bixby in the old Incredible Hulk series, trailed by sad piano music as he moves from one kitchen to the next. Cheng, who last December set up shop in Atlanta for the second time in five years, has made inscrutability as much of a trademark as his arousing, incendiary Szechuan dishes.

Four years ago, local food fanatics discovered the Szechuan cooking of Peter Cheng in a scruffy Marietta strip-mall joint called Tasty China—an innocuous name that became synonymous with nuclear meltdowns of the mouth. Cheng, who had two food writers chasing after him for the New Yorker and the Oxford American this year, possesses a culinary charisma that is two parts Pied Piper and one part Marquis de Sade: He wrangles devotees, hurting them so good with his "hot and numbing" beef rolls and his fried eggplant riddled with chiles, and then he leaves them for a restaurant in another town.