Tai Shan in Washington, DC

Today's post comes from some food adventures from June, 2007 in Washington DC's Chinatown. Washington has a large Chinatown with both lots of independent Chinese restaurants along with plenty of chains mixed in. I found it really interesting to see stores like Starbucks and CVS with their signs in Chinese rather than English smack dab in the middle of the nation's capitol. Very cool...

I ate at a restaurant called Tai Shan right up the block from Chinatown's huge Friendship Arch. Tai Shan wasn't my first restaurant choice in Chinatown, but due to a broken air conditioning in the first place, combined with some very hot travel companions, I ended up here.

Tai Shan had an interesting menu. They had all of the American-Chinese food standards, along with a lot of stuff I had never seen in a Chinese restaurant. And that's what I would want in a restaurant in a Chinatown. I decided to try something new and ordered something called Chicken Yak-Mein. Yak-mein was a type of thick noodle soup. It consisted of chicken, a hard boiled egg, onions, and noodles, all in a dark brown broth. It definitely could have used some more variety in the vegetables mixed in since the end result was kind of brownish and lacked color. Regardless of how it looked, the yak-mein did taste okay and I finished a good amount of the soup.

And now for the fun part at Tai Shan. After I finished my food, I went to the restroom to wash my hands from some sticky duck sauce. The restroom was down in the basement, right next to the kitchen. I entered the small bathroom and as soon as I closed the door, I noticed the large rat sitting on the sink. He then saw me, and after a few seconds of us staring at each other, he jumped on the floor and ran into a hole in the wall behind the toilet. At that point, since I had already finished my dinner, there was nothing I could do but laugh. I suppose Tai Shan is lucky that I found a rat in the bathroom funny, since I'm sure many other people's reactions would be quite different...