The D.C. area is widely considered to have really great Chinese food (clustered in Falls Church, Virginia and especially Rockville, Maryland.) There’s good Chinese food here, yes. But my wife and I disagree that most of it is great, as in some of the best you can eat.

Rockville is basically the metro area’s Chinatown—it was a common destination for Chinese families leaving D.C.’s Chinatown for the suburbs. So you would think it would be home to really great Chinese restaurants, both for the Chinese-American community and for everyone else. This is a region with pretty international tastes, after all.

So it’s really interesting that the restaurants aren’t quite all that. We think, for example, that Philadelphia’s Chinatown has better food, and New York’s probably even more so (though neither of us has been to New York for years, so we can’t say from experience).

But when we think about great Chinese food, there’s one, seemingly unlikely, place we think of...