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| - Our normal routine is to go out for Chinese on Christmas day, a practice that started about 20 years ago when the wife, after our traditional Christmas Eve family get together, threw down her tools and said "I'm finished! I'm not cooking anything on Christmas"! In desperation I investigated and found that most Chinese restaurants are open so we ended up going to our favorite place, House of Hunan in Fairlawn, which we did every year until we relocated to SE Michigan about 14 years ago. We kept up with this there as well, usually going over the border to Windsor, until we moved back to Ohio in 2014. Since we now live in Cleveland, we tried Siam Cafe last year, which was very good; however this year, we decided to take the trek back to the House of Hunan.
Unfortunately, my wife wasn't feeling well enough to go out so we decided to get takeout and, since virtually none of the restaurants in "Asia Town" seem to have a website with access to an updated menu, my daughter suggested we try China Cafe based on their menu and the mostly positive reviews on yelp and google. Well, there's nothing really remarkable here, the food was OK, comparable to our go-to takeout joint in Lakewood, New China King. Actually, it's probably not quite as good. The hot & sour soup was OK, my daughter was not impressed with the seafood pan fried noodles (although the tiny lobster tail portion was nice, the noodles didn't seem to be pan fried, just regular boiled noodles). I ordered two small items, chicken with black bean sauce and hunan beef. The former was pretty good; however in the latter, although the sauce and accompanying vegetables were good, the beef wasn't very tender. I also requested the hunan to be spicy, but it was quite bland.
Bottom line, since New China King is closer, we're within their delivery area, they typically deliver hot food to us (in SE part of Kamm's) within 20-30 minutes, the food is a little better, the online ordering service (which I really like) is EXACTLY the same for both places, and the prices are comparable, I see no reason to replace New China King as our usual takeout spot.
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