Tai Shan Chinese Restaurant, Washington, D.C.

Our celebration of Christmas continues, especially since St. Stephen's Day was a federal holiday. Last night after the movie, we had dinner at Tai Shan Chinese Restaurant, which is right by the Chinatown Metro stop on H Street. It looks very much like all the other low end Chinese restaurants in the area, although this one doesn't have a meat case or fish tank or anything fun like that out in the dining room area as do some of the others. Leo asked for the Chinese language menu and, as usual, did all the ordering.

Since I don't read Cantonese, I don't know the proper names of each of the dishes, so I'll just try to describe them and hope you get the drift. We started with a shared big bowl of seafood and tofu soup in a clear stock thickened with cornstarch. It was pretty standard. We had three entrees. One dish had strips of pork which had been dredged in flour and lots of salt and pepper and then deep fried, served on a bed of mixed sliced lettuce and chopped green onion. It was very tasty, which made up for the slight annoyance of the bone still being attached to each piece of pork. Our seafood dish was a melange of scored squid, two different kinds of mushroom, and assorted vegetables in a thin brown sauce. It was okay, but nothing really exciting. The third dish was a little odd. They took beef brisket, stewed (and hence gelatinous) bits of cartiledge, and big chunks of daikon and cooked them together in a brown sauce. The beef was flavorful, the cartiledge one of those acquired Chinese tastes, and the daikon odd. Daikon is a large, white radish which is probably most familar to those who frequent sushi bars and see shredded daikon on their plates as an edible garnish. They had somehow pickled the chunks of radish, leaving them with a bit of a sour-vinegar taste, and it wasn't really my favorite thing on the table.

Hot tea and steamed white rice were complimentary accompaniments.

I thought the food was ok here, but Leo didn't like it at all. He didn't think the beef and daikon dish was fresh and didn't think the seafood dish was exactly what he'd ordered. I don't know, since I don't speak any Cantonese. Service was okay, too, though I did notice that we got passed off to a different waiter twice, ending up with a Chinese person with heavily highlighted long hair and we couldn't decide if that person was male or female.