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| - Excellent Northern Style Chinese food, especially for Arizona. They make dumplings on the spot and you can purchase them frozen too if you really like them. If you're going in here for the first time, you may notice the abundance of Chinese people eating, which really speaks for itself.
For American people wanting to give this place a go, you could go for the standard Fried Rice with Kung Pao Chicken or something, or you can try some honest to goodness Northern Chinese cuisine. My recommendations for you would be the Beef Pies as a side dish if you're looking for something hearty and delicious as they're authentic Chinese street food.
Dumplings are quite good and obviously fresh. Their potstickers are decent too but they use their thick-skinned dumplings to make them, whereas I'm more used to potstickers with thinner skin. The potstickers also come with a lot of crust and served upside down.
Other noteworthy things are the Beef Noodle Soup. This place has the best Beef Noodle in town though quality consistency remains an issue. I've had Beef Noodle bowls that have been excellent and other times with the soup lukewarm and and an obviously diluted broth.
Reading some other reviews, I just want to clarify for others: XLB = Xiao Long Bao, which are basically small dumplings with soup inside them and are very good. They're usually a bit small and eating them will give you the dumpling skin, meat and soup all in one bite.
Service is good, and it's a small, tight knit group every time. Food does take a while though especially if it's busy. I've had waits from 20-30 minutes easily, so if you're in a hurry, call early.
Finally, a cool tip to share: something that's not well known is that they have a Lunch program for working Chinese people. People at Intel for example, have a person that gets a Bian Dang (Lunchbox) order from a bunch of people and drives over to Chou's Kitchen. They pick up all the lunchboxes and bring them to Intel to split to the workers. This is for people that really love their Chinese lunchboxes and I'm pretty sure they could serve one to you if you asked for it. I don't know how much it costs but it definitely exists.
Overall, this place while excellent for Arizona, if you're comparing to the real good stuff in Taiwan or China, it'll be more average for you.
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