Tue 24 Jan 2006
Zaw’s Asian Foods
2110 Murray Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15217-2106
(412) 521-3663
There’s an important distinction to be made between Restaurant Chinese food in general and Take-out Chinese food specifically. Some people like both, some like one more than the other, and some haven’t realized there are important differences.
Restaurant chinese food focuses a good deal of attention on pomp and presentation. Flowers made from shaved carrots, orange wedges at the end of your meal, portions sized to fit on an oblong family-style plate — these are the hallmarks of restaurant Chinese food.
Take-out, on the other hand, has but one fundamental goal: to deliver food to you, in a form that could plausibly be described as “Chinese”, at low cost, and in two sizes: Small (an enormous amount of food packed into a small box), and Large (a doubly-enormous quantity of food packed into a slightly larger box).
Because take-out Chinese leaves little to the imagination, there’s a lot of room for variation in quality between take-out joints. The lesser among them deliver a product that can only barely pass for food, let alone Delicious Chinese Food; the best among them deliver a wide array of brightly-flavored, well-differentiated dishes, so tasty that they fairly make your hair stand on end just thinking about them. A little greasy, a little edgy, a little funky, and absolutely irresistable.
And Zaw’s is Chinese take-out in its most prime of forms.