My annual Thanksgiving ritual, besides writing barely veiled cries for help in obscure local social blogs while mildly spun on muscle relaxers, is to find a nice dark corner of some weathered Chinese restaurant and just cry my 96 tears over a homemade plate of some kind of chicken in some kind of sweet sauce, cellular phone turned off and jealous hunger turned on.
Recommended to me by a similarly catastrophic soul, it’s damn hard to find a joint like the Canton Restaurant in this town anymore. Pushing almost 40 years in its mini-mall location at 2908 N. MacArthur Blvd., this place is beyond old-school. It was old-school before there was even an old-school which, in a time when everything old is torn down and rebuilt without a thought, makes this eatery a dine-in work of lost culinary art, with more character than any showy glass and neon food-tomb over in Downtown, Midtown and any town in-between.
The faded murals and windowless frontage give way to an elderly hostess seating famished passengers in a darkened dining area where cedar lattice and wood paneling are about as quote-unquote authentic as the décor gets. It sets the tone for the 70s-esque meal willingly, a classically singular and dutifully simple Chinese plate without the flash and flair, the fusion and the fuss that is typically masqueraded forth when true kitchen skills aren’t available.
The menu is filled with a seemingly forgotten staple of entrees such as Chicken Almond Dean and Moo Goo Gai Pan; most of these surprisingly varied dishes running around five or six bucks if you hit them up around lunch, and only a buck or two more if you hit the snooze button and come back later.