Chinese food in the Oak Park area

Any suggestions for really good Chinese food in the Oak Park area?

http://www.szechwanbeijing.com/

For straight Ameri-Chinese, I used to really dig on this place. Haven't gone it quite some time, but it was a decent step up from the beef and broccoli and glop/chicken kow and glop style places. If you are looking for the glop places, then New Star on North Avenue in Elmwood park should fit the bill.

Did not enjoy New Star at all, especially for the price, or Lotus. Is this place better than those?

Szechwan Beijing has a nice room and staff, but the food has gone catastrophically downhill these past two years. In particular, the beef quality (for Mongolian) and the BBQ pork are just pitiful, and the mu shu vegetables no longer edible, a frozen/canned mess.

I would love to hear about other options if anyone had experience in the area - there are lots of places along Roosevelt, and I've never seen reports of the places in Berwyn or Forest Park. Anyplace reliable for takeout? Particularly for good-old American Mongolian Beef with crispy noodles and leeks?

Depending on where you're at in Oak Park, Happy Garden on Belmont a little ways west of Harlem is well worth a try for carry out. They give very generous portions, and their meat is always of good quality and trimmed well. They do have a table or two set up inside, but eating in has never crossed my mind. A favorite of mine is their Hunan beef. Consistently tasty with a good amount of heat that sneaks up on you.

Happy Garden Chinese Restaurant
7710 W Belmont Ave
Chicago, IL

Santander wrote:I would love to hear about other options if anyone had experience in the area - there are lots of places along Roosevelt, and I've never seen reports of the places in Berwyn or Forest Park. Anyplace reliable for takeout?

Tasty House on Roosevelt in Berwyn is usually pretty reliable. Good bang for the buck, quality varies from avg to excellent.

Man, I had kinda been thinking of going back to Szechwan Beijing for one of their noodle dishes that I used to really love. It really used to be a good step above all of the joints in the area. Cogito has a decent choice in Tasty House, but, it's an Ameri-Chinese glop place as well. Take out is pretty much the only option, but it is what it is. Pretty much ALWAYS, in this area, you have to really explain what you want. I'm always the person asking for NO cornstarch, and hot peppers OTHER than the red pepper flakes. It kind of ensures I get something freshly prepared, and hopefully lets the cook know that I like non-glop, standard issue slop that they sling out all day. Hopefully, it will let them be creative, and make something they are proud of. Sorry for rambling, but the moral of the story is this: Most of the places will work with you if you ask them to. Tell them what you want instead of settling for the menu options. Yeah, it sucks that a lot of the places around these parts offer the same old tired glop, but they stay in business somehow - can't blame them for slinging what ppl want. For some other suggestions in the area, here's a thread from another board. I've heard from friends who live in Brookfield that their places a FAR superior than OP/BERWYN/FP for some reason. I have yet to investigate. Maybe I should start looking there, but I have a joint close that is totally open to creating stuff I like, how I like it.

http://www.berwyntalk.com/smf/index.php?topic=1982.0

Sorry about the whole Szechwan Beijing thing. Thanks, Santander, for the updated info. You saved me a trip as well.

The illustrious Val of Val's Halla told me that she and her staff love Luo's Peking House (113 N Marion). I went there maybe 20 years ago, and at the time thought it was just fine, and LO reported (4 years ago) that it has a old school charm:

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2028&p=15735&hilit=Luo%27s#p15735

I don't believe anyone else has ever covered this place on LTH or anywhere else.

Hmmm. I Just thought of something. Yum Thai has a decent selection of their takes on "Ameri-Chinese" standards if you read between the lines on their menu. I did once order sesame chicken from them when we had out of town guests. It really was not bad. Looking at the menu now, I see:
Crab Rangoon
Fried Wonton
wonton soup
Chow Mein - YES. Chow Mein
Fried Rice (although it will be thai style - lighter, but the basil fried rice is listed seperately)
Sweet&Sour chicken
Sesame Chicken
CHICKEN CHOP SUEY - Yes, seriously, it's listed!
Chicken Broccoli
Cashew Chicken
Pepper Steak
Beef pea Pod in oyster Sauce
Sweet&Sour pork
BBQ pork

I will second David. Luo's Peking on Marion is very reasonably priced, especially for lunch. My hot & sour soup-connoisseur of a husband loves their soup, and I think I mentioned it once to somebody who was looking for a good bowl of hot & sour. It is not a high-end Chinese place by any means and the food is not super consistent, but it is fine. I did read somewhere that there have been some recent employee changes that have affected the food somewhat, but you might want to give it a try.

I have always thought Szechuan Beijing, where my relatives used to love to have family get-togethers, was overpriced and mediocre.

Luo's Peking
113 N. Marion
Oak Park, IL 60301
(708) 386-5409

I will second Luo's also. They are usually pretty decent.

I've not been as thrilled with Luo Peking past appetizers (this is one of those, eat the egg roll and soup, then claim a pressing appointment elsewhere before ordering entrees, places for me).

Seebee, more data is always useful; I've never had a noodle dish at Szechwan Beijing, so maybe they're actually good and I need to stop fooling with the meat. Also - brilliant rec on Yum Thai. I was just there last night and thinking the same thing (and I have leftover Isaan, duck curry, and the "real" beef salad to enjoy today).

Mandarin Sun, Wing Wah, and Wings are mentioned in the linked Berwyn thread - any LTH intel on those places?

I will give Tasty House a shot next week and report back.

I tried Wing Wah only once, last year. The egg rolls sucked and so did the Szechuan beef that I tried. Haven't run the gauntlet since then. I have yet to find a good hot and sour soup in the near west burbs at a Chinese place.

Still looking for tasty Chinese food in Oak Park, since Szechwan Beijing started to go downhill. Lunch at See-Thru Kitchen was pretty good, but I'm sadly going to have to vote down on Tasty House, because of the horror that were three dishes over two visits last month:

Singapore Noodles - stale chow mein haphazardly stir-fried with canned mushrooms (slime included), untrimmed celery stalks, and flavorless barbecue pork shreds, and then shaken over with curry powder from a jar, not stirred in to the rest of the dish.

Mongolian Beef - nuggets of gristly flank tossed in peanut oil and so much jarred, machine-chopped garlic that you could breathe fire after eating the dish, on some wilted leeks and improperly-fried (and therefore inedible) cellophane noodles, shaken over with granulated sugar that had not melted

Ma Po Tofu (what the hell was I thinking) - extra-firm tofu, barely warmed through, with crusty boot-tread tofu rind, in an insipid tomato soup sauce, with saltless, greasy ground pork unworthy of Dominicks meatloaf mix, and no identifiable heat

Fried wontons and veggie fried rice were not abysmal, and the staff has been nice. Still hoping to test some of the other places up and down Roosevelt.

Lotus in Elmwood Park, on North just west of Harlem, is the only area Chinese restaurant I'd consider food from these days. I've only been there a couple of times, and it's been a while since I normally just make the drive to Chinatown when I have a craving, but my wife and I definitely found it to be preferable to other local options.

Luo's Peking is a spot I visit once every 18 months or so for nostalgia's sake. My parents live just a few blocks north of there, and my dad used to bring it home as the family Chinese takeout of choice for years before switching to New Star (where I will never eat again for reasons that cannot be detailed here) in my teens. I was perfectly happy with it until I was taken to Chinatown for the first time, the first week of my freshman year of college in Hyde Park. It's reasonably enjoyable as a periodic blast from the past, bordering on comfort food for me at this point, but not something I'd recommend for someone looking for good, not-your-typical-suburban Chinese.