Louisville, KYChinese

The pagoda shaped building on Shelbyville Road has been a Louisville mainstay since the 1960s, and Robin Garr's review keeps returning to the Hunan and Szechuan specialties. It is also one of the few kitchens in town serving dim sum, which is reason enough to bring a table of people on a weekend.

Robin Garr has followed the dim sum here since the late 1980s, when the restaurant introduced Louisville to the bite size Chinese snacks. The cart list still runs to roughly seventy five items, so the strategy is to order in waves and keep going until you run out of room on the table.

Chef Peng Looi mixes Chinese cooking with Southeast Asian technique and a Malaysian accent, so the menu reads differently from anywhere else in town. Robin Garr's review treats it as a Louisville standard rather than a novelty, and the room on Lexington Road has been holding that position for years.

A fast casual Germantown counter turning out crisp egg rolls and a moo goo gai pan built on velveted chicken that stays tender. Robin Garr's archived review makes the case that a neighborhood Chinese kitchen doing the standards properly is worth more than an ambitious one doing them carelessly.

The menu runs to about two hundred and twenty dishes, with roughly ninety in an authentic section tilted toward the spicy cooking of Sichuan. Robin Garr flags the cold sesame noodles, which arrive with the sauce and the noodles packed separately so you toss them yourself and nothing turns soft.