Description
According to The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, there are more Chinese restaurants in this country than McDonald's, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets combined. And far too many of them seem hell-bent on following the mass-produced, fast-food model, and taking one of the world's most ancient, complex cuisines and homogenizing it into something so bland, greasy, sweet, gloppy-sauced, and batter-fried that it's no longer recognizable in its home country. Fortunately, Tian Jin isn't one of them. The restaurant's chef is an alum of a Chinese five-star hotel and while his wide-ranging menu includes a few token Chinese-American items (cream cheese wontons!), it focuses mostly on Szechuan and Mandarin dishes indigenous to China. That means you'll find dishes as common as hot-and-sour soup along with lesser-seen items like garlic headcheese or three types of pork intestine. Favorites include the eggrolls and dumplings, which are far superior to those at most local Chinese eateries, the boiled beef, with its wild, woodsy, curry-like notes, and lingering, tingle of Szechuan peppercorns, and Chinese-style fried chicken that handily beats General Tso's
