The shrimp in mayonnaise sauce at Chinese American Restaurant on Bissonnet were enormous. The succulent white shrimp coated with thin mayonnaise sauce looked like clouds floating on a sea of chopped iceberg. They were topped with walnuts that had been dipped in honey and roasted. I speared a shrimp and some of the lettuce with my fork and stuck it in my mouth. It tasted like the best shrimp poor boy I have ever eaten -- only without the bread.
Daniel Kramer
The succulent shrimp in mayonnaise sauce isn't on the regular menu.
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Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays.
Sweet-and-sour lunch special: $2.99
Fried chicken: $5.50
Beef with pickled vegetables: $6.95
Chicken lettuce wraps: $9.95
Mayonnaise shrimp and walnuts: $9.95
11317 Bissonnet, 281-498-1280.
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"Fried chicken and soy sauce" was a whole fried chicken cut into chunks with a topping of shaved scallions and sliced serranos served with a simple soy sauce. The chicken skin was so crispy and the chicken so greaseless, my dining companion guessed it had been lightly steamed before it was fried.
The lotus root slices that came with our other entrée had paisley-shaped holes evenly spaced around the centers. They looked like Swiss cheese slices designed by Salvador Dalí. The dish was called "lotus wood with sliced pork" on the handwritten special menu, and we ordered it just to see what it was. The lotus root had the same sort of crunchy texture and neutral taste as water chestnuts. It took on the flavor of the other ingredients in the dish, which included mushrooms, black fungus, snow peas and pork in brown sauce.
On a previous occasion, I sampled the chopped chicken in lettuce nests, a huge pile of minced chicken cooked with mushrooms, water chestnuts and other savory items over crispy cellophane noodles, served with several heads worth of iceberg cups to make lettuce tacos. As an appetizer, it was enough for six people.
None of these brilliantly prepared, authentic Cantonese dishes appear on the regular menu of Chinese American Restaurant. Take a look at that lengthy document in its large red vinyl folder, and you will find such familiar Chinese-Americanisms as crab puffs, chop suey and sweet and sour chicken.
It's been decades since Calvin Trillin took a Chinese professor to a restaurant in New York's Chinatown to decipher all the specials on the handwritten banners on the walls, and still the Chinese tradition of the restaurant within a restaurant continues. And still we non-Chinese speakers are convinced we are missing something.
How many times have you pointed to an intriguing-looking dish on someone else's table at a Chinese restaurant, only to have the waiter reply, "Not for you!"? The sad thing is, the waiter is usually right. They have fried intestines and tripe with pickled vegetables at Chinese American on Bissonnet, and you probably wouldn't really want any. But if you are determined enough, you can eat some great Cantonese food here.
I never would have set foot in the Chinese American Restaurant, which is located in a strip center that also houses an excellent Mexican carnicería and an African-American fashion store, if it hadn't been for an e-mail from a food writer friend of mine. Francis Lam, whose e-mail address begins with "chopsticksenator," grew up second-generation Chinese-American in suburban New Jersey. His parents moved to Sugar Land when they retired around ten years ago. While Francis was in town for the holidays, his parents took him to Chinese American Restaurant. He had this to say about the place:
"The food I had at Chinese American I recognized as homestyle -- unaffected, inelegant, but tasty and satisfying -- comfort food, if you will. I never saw the menu; maybe they do a sizable 'takeout egg roll' kind of business. The food we ordered was all verbal, through conversation with the server. A lot of Chinese restaurants my parents take me to do a lot of off-the-menu business. Not that they necessarily have secret specials, but there is a pretty standard battery of dishes that most cooks know how to make. The best of these dishes -- the steamed minced pork with dried fish and the eggs with salty and sour pickled greens -- showed an intensity of flavor and juiciness that made them particularly excellent for scarfing down with bowls and bowls of rice."
Seduced by Francis's description, I made my first visit to Chinese American. As he led me to expect, it was an utterly ordinary restaurant. The interior had a red brick floor, a dirty white acoustical tile ceiling, paneling in various mismatched shades and wooden armchairs with red vinyl seats and backs. The tables were covered with clear plastic sheets, which seemed odd since the tablecloths underneath the protective plastic were white shiny plastic.
I was getting my food to go, so I walked to the bar at the front of the restaurant, where the waiter handed me the big red menu. I didn't see the dishes Francis described, so I asked the waiter for "steamed minced pork." He said they didn't have any. Then I told him that a Chinese friend of mine had ordered it here, so I knew they had it.
This caused him to produce a handwritten menu of special dishes written in Cantonese and English. There were no other copies of this document and the original piece of paper was getting pretty worn. But I found a dish called "ground steamed pork with salted fish" on the list and guessed this was the one Francis had raved about. I also got the minced chicken and lettuce nests off the special menu and then ordered some familiar favorites like orange beef and garlic pork from the regular menu.
