The Chopstick Senator Sent Me

Back home, I compared the minced chicken on lettuce tacos and the tangy orange beef with Mak Chin's versions of the same dishes ["Two Faces of Mak Chin's," by Robb Walsh, February 1]. You get more than twice as much of each dish for the money at Chinese American. The minced chicken at Chinese American had a lot more ingredients, which stretched the chicken, but also provided a lot of interesting flavors and textures. And while the orange beef at Chinese American lacked the refreshing mandarin sections you get at Mak Chin, I liked the well-done meat much better.

We all tried to like the steamed ground pork and salted fish, which looked like an enormous breakfast sausage patty. But it had a strong fermented fish aftertaste that wasn't saying "comfort food" to me. No doubt plenty of people find my family's comfort food favorite, sauerkraut and pig parts, equally uncomforting.

A lot of people ask me to recommend a Chinese restaurant in Houston. And most of them balk when I say Fung's Kitchen because they're thinking of something cheaper. Like Tex-Mex joints, American Chinese restaurants got popular because of their low prices. And while I love upscale Chinese restaurants, I understand the need for cheap neighborhood Chinese restaurants, too. In that regard, Chinese American is hard to beat.

On my second visit, I succumbed to the allure of their unbelievably cheap lunch specials. The bargains start at $2.65 for six fried chicken wing pieces. I got extravagant and shelled out $3.45 for the pork with garlic sauce. All of the lunch specials come with an egg roll, fried or steamed rice and an egg-drop or hot-and-sour soup (it's 50 cents extra for wonton soup). Iced tea is 85 cents.

As you might expect, the lunch specials are nothing to write home about. The hot-and-sour soup was nothing but broth and egg drops -- no lily buds, no black fungus, nada. The pork was cut with a lot of vegetables, and while the vegetables were excellently prepared, they didn't satisfy me. I know, I know: What do you expect for three bucks and change?

Along with a lunch special, we also ordered another item off the handwritten Cantonese menu called salted eggplant and shrimp. It sounded good, and at first glance it looked good too. It was a big pile of golden-brown battered and fried rounds. Each contained a slice of eggplant and a whole shrimp married together under a thick blanket of batter and deep-fried. It would have been an astonishingly good dish if it hadn't been for a little excess oil.

"They didn't wait for the oil in the deep fryer to get hot enough," my tablemate concluded. It was only eleven-thirty, so I voted that we forgive them this mistake. But my grease-averse friend saw the need to blot each eggplant round vigorously, which created such a mess of fat-saturated napkins on the table, you'd think we had been engaged in liposuction surgery rather than lunch.

It wasn't until my final visit to Chinese American that I finally lucked into the good stuff. The mayonnaise shrimp and the fried chicken on the handwritten Cantonese menu were both excellent and relatively cheap.

I was also determined to get some of the salty, sweet and sour pickled vegetables Francis raved about, so I ordered sliced beef with pickled vegetables from the big red menu. It turned out to be a satisfying combination of exotic-flavored pickled mustard greens with familiar-tasting Chinese stir-fried beef and soy sauce.

It's an interesting restaurant. If you are looking for chop suey or a cheap lunch special with sweet-and-sour pork, an egg roll and soup, it's there for you. And if you are Cantonese and want scrambled eggs with sweet and sour pickled vegetables, or some other homestyle comfort food, they will make that for you, too. Chinese American is as authentic as you want it to be.