Chen's Kitchen -- General Tso's

Today we head to Second Street in Manchester, a strip stretching from the Bedford Town line to the Granite Street Bridge that is filled with fast food and slower food that will clog your arteries just as quickly once you eat it.

So, I was in the area recently and expected to be partaking in some of that greasiness, but instead found myself at a packed in Chinese joint right across from McDonald's named Chen's Kitchen.

It appears to be located inside a repurposed residential building, but has been resigned inside to be a couture fancy Chinese-American place. On that note it doesn't do too terribly, even though it falls a little short of the mark. The wallpaper is the only real thing destroying the delusion of being in a place that has food priced far higher than what is served.

On that note, I cannot complain. Here you can see the General Tso's Lunch Special. It certainly isn't a heaping amount of food to be sure, but it is tasty and passes the General Tso's stringiness test. If you're a fan of Tso's sauce, you might be disappointed here since it's a gelatinous coating rather than a sauce scattered over the plate and the croquettes.

The wait staff was not bad either, so we've gotten the good things out of the way. There were two bad things that came up during this meal.

The first one was the free Hot and Sour soup that came with the luncheon special. It had far too much stock in it, there was an overly musky aftertaste at first that eventually you had to plow through with your tastebuds. By the fourth or fifth spoonful, the taste went away, but it was awkward at first.

That was minor though compared to the parking. If I owned this restaurant, I would go to the next door houses every day to see if they wanted to sell so I could expand the parking. This restaurant must be next to impossible to fill unless there's alot of carpooling or Manchester decides to add a bus stop to this restaurant, and I doubt people who use the bus would go to such a hoighty toighty place as this.

Still, I think it deserves another meal. They have a wide array of Japanese offerings as well, and this meal certainly convinced them that they know what they're doing.

Meal: General Tso's Lunch Special
Price: $7.58
Speed of Service: 10 minutes
Time of Meal 12:00 PM Weekday