TulaneLSU's Top 10 restaurants in Houston's Chinatown

Dear Friends,

Driving through China last week whetted my appetite for Chinese food, but not a single restaurant in China, TX, or should I say, not the single restaurant, for there was only one, served Chinese food. Even after I entered the “China Market” and asked for an egg roll, the cashier looked at me with a puzzled face and said, “We don’t serve egg rolls here.” So westward I went to Houston, where I know it has a vibrant and expansive Chinatown.

Houston’s Chinatown seems unending and if you drive through it a few times, you might become intimidated by just how much is there. From Gessner on its eastern limit to the Pavillion Village near Highway 6 on its west, Bellaire Boulevard’s Chinatown is a linear five miles of restaurant after restaurant, grocery stores, tea shops, acupuncturist and dentist offices. Each side of the six lane boulevard is filled solidly with these commercial establishments. To call them strip malls would not be accurate, as they are usually organized in a square fashion. And if you were an anthropologist surveying this landscape without any other knowledge, you might conclude that the people of this area care about three things: food, teeth, and foot massages.




At one time this Apple Dentist office had a red apple on its roof. Now it dons the Granny Smith.

Driving it will never give you a sense for what it is. Although it was designed to be driven, to understand it, you must walk it. For some, walking ten miles of the out and back linear path is too much. You will probably double the miles if you wander through each plaza’s many branching fingers. But I see no other way to understand it truly than to walk it. You will notice, in general, the farther west you go, the newer the strip malls become. You will also notice the farther west you go that the Chinese influence gives way to the Vietnamese. Scattered throughout the Chinese and Vietnamese enclaves, which apparently the Vietnamese people some posters here know in Houston would not appreciate being conflated together, is a light peppering of Japanese and Korean restaurants.







Houston’s Chinese population, like New Orleans, came to the area around 1860. The Second Opium War, one of whose aims by the British was to legalize and control the opium trade, continued the economic depression in China that the First Opium War had started. At the same time, enslaved African Americans gained their freedom through the Thirteenth Amendment, leaving a labor vacuum on some plantations and farms in the South. Destitute Chinese immigrants were happy to fill that vacuum, and they poured in port cities.

As in New Orleans, the Chinese established tight-knit enclaves in the poorer area of Houston, just east of downtown. There, Chinese clothes cleaners and restaurants thrived, just as Charles Tung in New Orleans and the Chins in Mobile. They remained there until the early 1980s, when real estate prices downtown made selling attractive. And that is what most of the Houston community did – they moved westward to where land was cheap, to an area along Bellaire outside the Loop.

Few people realize that New Orleans has a historic and large Chinese population. That is due largely to there being no modern Chinatown, nor hardly even a hint that a Chinatown ever existed in New Orleans. When the New Orleans Tulane-LSU medical complex took over the old Chinatown in the 1930s, no new Chinatown was built. Some have suggested that the New Orleans Chinese assimilated well and point to the Lee family that gave us Harry. However, why the Chinese community did not reorganize in a tight neighborhood is partly due to how rapidly they were displaced and when they were displaced. Had New Orleans’ Chinese community been able to maintain a presence downtown until the 1980s, they likely could have remained intact by moving to the suburban regions, as happened in Houston.

When I think of Chinese food, I think of summer afternoons watching the great “Yan Can Cook” with Martin Yan on PBS. And, of course, 5 Happiness and its American Chinese special sesame chicken. We never grew up on dim sum or some of the finer dishes in Chinese cuisine. Even when Mother and I have traveled to some of the cities with large Chinatowns, like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco, we have hardly ever gotten any Chinese food. Mother sees Chinese cuisine as one of the lesser forms of cuisines. Honestly, I do not think she likes chicken feet, duck, and the spiciness.

As Mother did not join this adventure, I was free to wander through Houston unencumbered by her insouciance and snide remarks about Chinese food. Spending two full days walking the long street of Houston’s Chinatown, Bellaire Blvd, creates an appetite. I believe my total was 13 restaurants and tea and dessert houses patronned.

The day before my journey began, I was doing reconnaissance and research on H-E-B, as part of a grand project which will be unveiled on the OT very soon. While taking pictures, a lovely older couple approached me and asked what I was doing. I told them, “I have a grand project for the OT and I must learn as much about H-E-B as I can.” We got to talking and I mentioned how famished I was for Chinese food and they made several suggestions.

“Excellent. Thank you for your advice. I am alone on this trip, so if you would like to join me you are more than welcome. I will be starting my journey on the eastern edge of Chinatown tomorrow morning at 10. It is my goal to eat in ten restaurants tomorrow” It seemed right to invite this lovely couple.

After a few seconds, the couple looked at each other, half smiling, half not knowing exactly what to say, and said, “Well, that, that would be good, but we only have time to eat in three restaurants.”

So they joined me for three meals the other day. Because of their slowness, I had to stretch my Chinatown journey to two days. The second day on my own was a much more fruitful journey. A reminder that when I am researching, even though it is good manners to invite others, it is more efficient if I go it alone.