Good Chinese in Easy Reach

By Jason Haas

Tucked away amongst the more famous establishments on State Street is China Hut, a restaurant offering a variety of decent Chinese cuisine for reasonable prices, a sort of combination of an American-style fast food joint and a decent Chinese restaurant. Located next to Wong's Wok, China Hut is a clean, sparsely decorated restaurant with a friendly staff, many of whom fluently speak Chinese. If you've visited China Hut within the past few months, you might remember it as being a quiet and incredibly well-priced restaurant, with the questionable characteristic of serving a good deal of their menu from large metal containers.

Recently, China Hut has made laudable steps to improve its service and overall quality, with the only major sacrifice being a fairly stiff price increase. What I consider the best bargain on the menu, the chicken fried rice, has gone from being a mass-produced ($2.30) plateful of food, to a more costly $3.17, but higher quality plateful of food. As far as beverages, slightly overpriced Pepsi products and water are available in abundance at the counter. With the addition of many new duck, pork, beef, vegetable and other fine dishes, our favorite entree has gotten a wonderful upgrade: it is now prepared fresh, with the addition of peas, carrot bits, vegetable shoots, and much more chicken.

The other menu items, such as dumplings and noodle-based dishes, are served with the same efficiency that I have come to appreciate at China Hut. All meals come on a tray that makes it easy for you to transport it from the counter to your table, complete with a fortune cookie, with silverware and chopsticks available at the food pickup counter.

At the each table you find bottles of soy sauce and Chinese hot oil (the uninitiated beware!), along with salt and pepper. There is enough seating to accommodate the customers during the peak hours when I have been there, and even during the busy moments, China Hut has not slipped from its high standards of cleanliness and efficiency.

In fact, the only thing that has slipped is the prices, and unfortunately, they have slipped in an upward direction. Otherwise, I heartily recommend China Hut for the huge amount of stir fry that they give you for what still is a fairly decent price. But with each dollar being able to buy less, my final rating descends with it.