PRICE:
Frommer's Recommended

The best of the Washington area's Chinese restaurants are not in the city at all, but in the suburbs. The increasingly shrinking Chinatown still has several, including Tony Cheng's Seafood Restaurant. City Lights, meanwhile, has done quite well for itself in its Dupont Circle location since 1987, feeding the office and after-work crowd hungry for dumplings and fried rice. You can join the fray and dine in. If you are staying at a nearby hotel, you might consider ordering food to go; takeout prices are cheaper for some items. Some of the most popular dishes include crisp fried Cornish hen appetizer prepared in a cinnamon-soy marinade and served with a tasty dipping sauce, Chinese eggplant in garlic sauce, stir-fried spinach, crisp fried shredded beef, and Peking duck. The unpretentious setting is a three-tiered dining room with much of the seating in comfortable leather booths and banquettes. Neat white-linen tablecloths, cloth flower arrangements in lighted niches, and green neon track lighting complete the picture. The one hitch here is the inattentive service. There's a full bar.

Copyright: Excerpted from Frommer's Washington, D.C. 2009, (c) 2008, Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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