I will add my vote for Taipei to the others. I've eaten there 3 or 4 times and been pleased every time. I especially like the garlic eggplant, which uses halved purple baby eggplants rather than pieces of large eggplant--very striking if you don't mind purple food. It also has the most tasteful decor of any Chinese restaurant I can remember going to in any city. I ate over the weekend at the New Dumpling House on Murray Ave in SqHill, and really wouldn't recommend it. It was acceptable, but not memorable. My main complaint is that the "hot and spicy" dishes weren't, at all (and my preferred heat quotient is only about 5 on the infamous 1-10 scale), and with one exception there weren't other interesting flavors to make up for the lack of promised heat. Three of the four things we ordered were marked hot and spicy on the menu (hot and sour soup, Mala Chicken and a shrimp dish whose name I can't remember). The best was the Mala Chicken. The shrimp I really didn't care for--it was in what seemed like a tomato-based sauce that was more like sweet and sour, my least favorite. The other main problem was that our waiter was unable to answer questions about the menu, apparently because of the language barrier. I asked him what Mala sauce was, because the menu listed the ingredients in the dish but didn't say anything about the sauce. He replied by reading the list of ingredients off the menu. I said again that I was wondering what kind of sauce it was. Was it brown sauce? No, he said, it was Mala sauce. We gave up on getting an answer and ordered it anyway, but until the food arrived we were left unsure that we were communicating well enough to get any of the dishes we'd ordered. Tony
Pittsburgh, PA