In Which There Was A Happy Family: The Quest For The Best Chinese Take-Out

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. – Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf has that right on the money, even if some people might be afraid of her.

Being not afraid, my quest for the best Chinese take-out in Shelton has brought me to the doorstep of the restaurant at 872 Bridgeport Avenue.

Snuggled away in the Plaza, the Happy Family is a bit different from last week’s contender, on Howe Street. First off, the Happy Family is a sit-down restaurant where you can get take-out if you want to, whereas the Joy Lee is very much a take-out place; you come, you get your food, and then you go on your merry way.  They’ve got seats if you’re so inclined, but few enjoy their comforts, opting instead to chow down on their dumplings within the confines of their own home.

The Happy Family is a quiet, cozy little restaurant with a friendly wait-staff, but in this case, I take my food and run, so those charms are unfortunately lost on me. Though that doesn’t make them irrelevant, specifically because being a sit-down restaurant has a few effects, primarily on price, speed and the quality of the food.

First off, price: $12.00. For chicken lo mein, crab rangoon and a soda, that my friends, is pricy, and it took probably about twice as long as Joy Lee, as the food wasn’t in my hands for a little over ten minutes, but that honestly says more about the speed of Joy Lee rather than any idea of laziness on part of Happy Family, good food takes time.

All is not lost however, as the food was, in a word, tasty. The noodles in the lo mein were properly cooked and were surprisingly the best part of the whole affair.  I was really quite impressed by the noodles, because in taking the time to make the noodles good, they’re showing that they're doing things right on a basic level, working from the basics up, which gives me a much better feeling about the rest of their menu.

The rest of the lo mein was pretty standard though, the vegetables were nothing special but were there in sufficient amounts and the chicken was pretty much identical to the chicken found in lo mein anywhere else: grilled, cut into little bite-sized bits and a tad on the greasy side, which is likely just a byproduct of being tossed in the mix with everything else and there’s no way around that. C’est la vie.

The crab rangoon was the standard fare, six of the larger variety that requires at least two bites. It had a good mix of cream cheese and crab, and was pretty decent, but that’s it, just decent. They lacked any sort of flair about them, but being crab rangoon, they were still fairly delicious (it’s kind of akin to chocolate chip cookies; if you like them, are there really ANY you don’t actually enjoy eating?).

“You are an optimistic person,” –So Sayeth the Completely Wrong and Boring Fortune Cookie

All in all, this is a good restaurant, but I’d suggest going there to sit down and enjoy their full service rather than just getting take-out (if you’re going to pay sit-down restaurant prices, you should enjoy sit-down restaurant service).

3.5 out of 4 stars