Searching for Exceptional Chinese Food

[beantowntitletown]

might be opening a big can of worms here, but will be heading back east to boston to visit family next week and am looking for exceptional chinese food for dinner. my family lives on the suburban south shore and next to the cape, and we’ve been going to chinatown to eat at china pearl, chau chow city, and jumbo seafood the last several years. these are good, but we’re kind of getting into a rut. while we love cantonese/hong kong style, we’re open to all regional cuisines, and atmosphere/ambience doesn’t matter. geographically we’d like to stick to the south shore on up to chinatown. but in looking at some recent chow threads and restaurant websites, it doesn’t look there’s much out of the ordinary on the south shore. would just appreciate your thoughts on places where they do food really, really well, and don’t modify it for western tastes. as an aside, we don't read chinese and can only speak toishan (poorly), so we might be missing some good stuff on that basis alone. thanks.

[Carp85]

Maui Restaurant in Brockton is always a good choice coming out of the south shore

[beantowntitletown]

thanks again for pointing me to best little restaurant. five members of my family and i had a great dinner there on sunday. Our only regret was that we got full, and so couldn’t sample all of the menu (lol). Among the dishes we had were the fried spareribs with garlic, dried cuttlefish in xo sauce, string beans with fermented soy paste, pea pod stems, soy duck with tofu, steamed pork patty with salt fish, and 3 delight chow mein. the best of these were the spareribs and the pork patty. the pork patty is definitely true home cookin’, and it brought back memories. will definitely go back to sample a whole new range of menu items next time i visit boston. will also visit as many of the other recommendations as i can fit in.

also had time to sneak a quick dim sum meal at china pearl in quincy. it was thursday at 11:30 am, so there were no crowds. the choices were pretty limited, though, and the dough on some of the dumplings (esp. har gau) was overly thick and doughy. but it sure beats trying to find parking in chinatown.

[treb]

You can pretty much throw a dart in Chinatown and get a winner. How blessed are we!! I like Jumbo Seafood,

[beantowntitletown]

thanks, everyone, for the prompt and excellent responses. i wanna go to every place suggested, but too little time (gonna do a fried clam run, too). just read the thread on the best little restaurant chowdown, and i was drooling the whole time (thanks, velda mae). right now it looks like best little restaurant for sure, then sichuan garden and little q if there's time. probably have to visit again in the fall to keep working my way down the list. by the way, striperguy, one of my brothers is a striper nut, and is counting down the days to the canal run.

[StriperGuy]

I've got a got a friend that is absolutely bonkers for Little Q Hot Pot in Quincy which is a bit closer for you:

Little Q Hotpot Restaurant
www.littlequsa.com
1585 Hancock St
Quincy, MA 02169
[phone]

[Spike]

That's a good idea and probably new for the OP.
Don't bother w/ the seafood items to dump in the hotpot though...the seafood taste doesn't really work that well w/ the hotpot liquid IMHO.

[mwk]

If you go for Little Q, try one of the dishes from the "foundation Items" section of the menu. These are already cooked and don't need to be boiled. The lamb dumplings and the Little Q hot and spicy noodles are very good, as are the scallion pancakes.

[drbangha]

If you are willing to go a couple miles north of the city, Fuloon in Malden has been getting a lot of discusion on here.

[gini]

Best Little Restaurant - Cantonese, not just seafood.
Peach Farm - Cantonese Seafood
New Shanghai or Wings - Shanghai style
Sichuan Garden in Brookline - Sichuan.
MuLan for Taiwanese - this actually slightly better than Taiwan Cafe, but I love TC also.

[Velda Mae]

My vote goes to Best Little Restaurant on Hudson St. in Chinatown. It's in the space formerly occupied by Ho Yuen Ting. If you search this board, you'll see reviews from a recent gathering of CHs there.

[Luther]

Yeah, it's pretty much all up in Boston or to the north.

Sichuan Gourmet, Sichuan Garden, Fuloon, Shangri-La, MuLan, Shanghai Gate. Chinatown pretty much has the Cantonese stuff covered, though I quite like New Trend for the simple stuff. I dunno if Northern cuisine is really so well represented... there's Wang's and Qingdao but I wouldn't describe them as "exceptional" so much as "tasty, simple food."

[Karl S]

Don't count Quincy out - there's a very established east Asian population there. I love Hong Kong Eatery in downtown Quincy.

[galleygirl]

Plus, Southern Garden at Kam Man Center....