Chickity China the Chinese Chicken

So let's be honest, picking places to eat is not always an easy thing to do. Especially once you mix in a group with different tastes and previous meals. This is the predicament we often find ourselves in when Kevin comes to town, and now with the added pressure of making every meal count for my adoring public it just is borderline unbearable. Not really but it sounded good and dramatic, have to pretend to sacrifice for you guys once in a while.

So we were left to fend for ourselves one night and bounced around options like a kid hopped up on skittles and an empty Adderall prescription. So finally we decide to just head north and end up pulling into Pink's Pizza only to realize that it is essentially a grab a go kind of place and that was of no interest to us. So then the topic of Dumpling King came up. This is one of our favorite haunts and always a primo option for Chinese dumplings for a good cheap price. Unfortunately it was no where close to our location at the time so we scrambled. A thought occurred to me that I had recently read about a Houston's Top 100 Dishes on the Houston Press website for a dumpling dish in the much closer Heights neighborhood.

Just for a quick background blurb, the Heights is a neighborhood in Houston inside the 610 loop north of I-10 west. I will take flack for this, but the best way to describe this area is pretentious the majority of the neighborhood is small dilapidated homes yet the people cling to their Heights culture as if denying their association with Houston. But I suppose all towns have some sort of area like that and I'll still head up that way once in a while for some good grub.

So we pulled up to what might have once been a Long John Silver's but has since been given a face lift. The interior settings were surprisingly nice compared to what I was expecting, and the waitress was incredibly prompt and courteous even if we couldn't understand much of what she said to us. One quick disclaimer, when eating with Kevin the order of business is get the food as fast as you can before he has it in his mouth, that being said photos came after a few of the dishes has been eaten up.

So the first order of business was ordering appetizers and these supposedly epic dumplings. First item up was the edamame, a Japanese steamed soy bean, that is always a good way to start an Asian meal.






Then came the first round of dumplings. To give you an idea of ordering here you must first choose between vegetable and meat (usually a pork), and then choose between steamed or pan-fried. So the natural logic on this is to somehow make your choices to encompass all options.






Here is the steamed vegetable dumpling, as you can see the damage had been done by the time I had the thought to get a picture in. The flavor was good on these, but they seemed to have trouble staying together as the wrapper was opening, and the price gave you 6 dumplings where at Dumpling King you would get nearly twice that.






The pan-fried pork dumplings held together a little better than the vegetables. The flavor was still good, but once again they have nothing on the King, I suppose that at least they live up to their name. The shining star here was the dipping sauce, but once again the King has an edge because you can make your own dipping sauces from 6 different ingredients.

We also ordered two entrees trying heard to figure out what was good at the place and what we were craving. So we decided to go with Mongolian Beef (another issue of half the plate being gone before I could snap a shot), the dish was decent but nothing outstanding.






Then came my personal favorite of the night Chili Lemongrass Chicken. The dish was tender and full of flavor and everyone seemed to not be able to get enough.






Finally Kevin had a craving for fried rice (I personally prefer the steamed rice with a dish) so he got an order of beef fried rice taking a stab at whatever meat he thought would make it work. Needless to say, he won't be ordering that any time soon.






So what have we learned here? That some days the lists work (Max's Wine Dive) and other times like here they are not always correct. I'm sure I'll be writing up Dumpling King before too long, especially if Kevin gets that itch again (and I don't mean the crabs).

Edit: so while tracking down photos for the next write up I realized I missed the best photo of all, my fortune cookie. So first think of the "... in bed" addition to the fortune while you read this. Second, realize Houston has a very public and very large gay community. And with those two thoughts in mind soak up all that this fortune had to offer me:



Thanks Heights Asian Cafe