Ordering chinese?
Here are some possibilities:
Golden Crown: 410-467-3213
New China: 410-234-8359
Orient Express 410-889-0003
Paul Chen's: 410-235-8744
When sampling the Chinese food available for delivery to the Homewood campus, an important fact must be acknowledged -- you can't get great Chinese food delivered in Charles Village. But this doesn't mean there isn't a wide variety of good Chinese to satisfy your late-night cravings: Golden Crown, New China, Orient Express and Paul Chen's all offer Chinese cuisine of decent quality. And while most Hopkins students develop a preference for one place over the others, this choice is often no more than a result of habit or a single bad experience with one restaurant; in reality, the food offered by all four is pretty comparable.
The question, then, becomes one of what to order, rather than where to order from. As there are slight differences in the selections offered by each restaurant (and in the cost of these selections), your favorite dish, your appetite and the size of your wallet may be the biggest factors in determining which place is best for you. Just keep in mind that all four choices offer the most popular dishes: orange chicken, sesame chicken, beef and broccoli, etc... and all deliver for free if your order costs more than $10 ($12 for Paul Chen's). So if you stick to the classics and are easy to please, just pick up the nearest menu and order your food now.
When ordering, always consider the specials that are offered; these are usually the best way to get the most food for the least amount of money. All four restaurants have lunch combinations, consisting of a main dish, rice and an appetizer (usually an egg roll) for around $5, and only Paul Chen's doesn't offer a larger version of the same thing as a dinner special. Though they're essentially the same, the dinner specials available from Golden Crown, New China and Orient Express vary slightly. Both Orient Express and Golden Crown offer an entree, an appetizer, a soup and rice for $7.95. While Orient Express gives the choice of fried or steamed rice (fried rice from Golden Crown will cost you $1 extra), Golden Crown's special boasts many more options -- five, not three, different soups are available, and you can choose fried or steamed chicken dumplings, sesame shrimp toast, fried wontons or an egg roll as your appetizer.
For those with lighter appetites, New China offers a dinner special without the soup for about $2 less. Not only is this option cheaper, it also includes a much more appetizing fried rice. Unlike the soy sauce-soaked creations of Orient Express and Golden Crown, New China's fried rice is the real thing, with bits of egg, pork, carrots and peas. If you want to save a little money and appreciate good rice, this is the way to go... or you can just order from one of the other restaurants and get a second meal -- or at least a midnight snack -- out of your order.
Paul Chen's, though it offers no dinner specials, attracts a large customer base because of its large selection of entrees, especially vegetarian options. While all four restaurants offer some type of fried or steamed vegetables, only Paul Chen's makes dishes with tofu or other meat substitutes. In total, more than 25 different choices without meat products are available, and while the "monk's beef" and other substitutes don't taste much like the real thing, their flavor is still sure to satisfy.
In addition to these vegetarian options, Paul Chen's also offers a larger variety of seafood (including lobster) than the others, and specialties including duck and lamb are absent from the other menus. This selection does come at a cost, though -- expect dinner at Paul Chen's to cost a few dollars more than elsewhere.
While Paul Chen's menu is by far the largest, the other restaurants also have their own bragging rights. New China offers Chow Ho Fun, a mixture of wide noodles, onions, vegetables and your choice of meat.
Only Orient Express carries sushi, and its large selection of sushi, sashimi and maki rolls includes nearly 100 options. And Golden Crown, while it serves nothing that the others don't, is open an hour later nearly every night. As you see, each place has its own advantages ... try them all, and find your favorite. And once you find yourself ordering from the same place, time after time, as you undoubtedly will, remember that three other restaurants, all with slightly different options, also deliver Chinese food.
As your fortune cookie might point out, a nice change of pace every once in a while can work wonders.
