What would you prefer to order, something whose name you don’t understand, or something whose name you do understand but the combination of ingredients is strange to you? The biggest problem we face at Chinese restaurants in Chinatown is that the waitresses don’t know much English, and we know zero Chinese. We can’t ask about the dishes and have to rely solely on the English description, if it is written, which leads to the second problem: all the descriptions are the same.
Not just that. If you are not Chinese and have spent many years eating $7 Chinese buffets like me, you probably know that there’s hardly any difference between Szechwan chicken, orange chicken, sweet and sour chicken, and whatever chicken. Same goes for fried rice, chow mein, vegetables, and other edibles, which appear identical everywhere (unless it’s really bad). So imagine my excitement of spotting “tai lou mein” and “pickle and pork rice noodle soup” as I flipped through the menu at Szechwan Restaurant on 8th Street. We’ve never heard of those things.
The tai lou mein is, unexpectedly, a bowl of noodle soup. (We thought we’re in for stir fried noodles.) It’s the same thick round egg noodle in chow mein, drenched in a very slightly corn-starchy sweet broth with fresh bamboo shoots, shrimp, pork, chicken, mushroom, carrots, and a cracked egg (which the waitress called “scrambled egg”), topped with green onions. It turns out a safe good bet. From a reliable source we learn that perhaps the pinyin transcription of the name should be da lou mein instead of “tai lou mein”.