lokalgood

Recently a rare craving for Chinese struck me hard. After some web searching to no avail and a false start to Old Town, we ended up at Peking Gourmet Inn near Seven Corners on the recommendation of a friend. What a surprise.  Place is terrific. Growing up in the country, the Chinese restaurant 15 minutes away was one of the few restaurant outings we undertook with any frequency. So I have all these happy, and likely heavily marked up, memories of family outings at the tiny China King restaurant in Leesburg. Contrast that with the mostly unremarkable experiences I’ve had in the few times I’ve eaten Chinese as an adult in Alexandria and my expectations for satisfying this rare craving in modern times were low.

Short story, PKI surprised in lots of nice ways. Behind a completely non-descript store front we found a big, bustling (stuffed on a Monday night) restaurant with all kinds of sights, sounds, smells I hadn’t encountered in a Chinese restaurant east of San Francisco. Old school decor, full and busy bar, tons of families at big tables, older, distinguished looking and jacketed waiters flying around, shirley temples for the kids, scrumptious Peking Duck carved right at the table, Moo shu pork with hand cooked pancakes, kids digging the food, etc.  Wasn’t cheap (north of a $100 for 5 including 3 kids) but a really nice and different family outing.  One that I could see us repeating every once in a medium while to build up our own little Chinese food ritual and associated kid memories.

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