Double Dragon - Columbia Plaza, 501 Columbia Street, East Greenbush, NY 12061
(No Website, but a partial menu can be found here)
As we mentioned in our previous post, we did not have an update for last week as we were living up to our blog name by being out on the road. During some of our time away from home, we were visiting family in East Greenbush, New York. While we were there, we made it a point to stop at a few of our favorite restaurants in that area. For the first of our two updates for today, we will spotlight one of those restaurants.
Now, I know what you're thinking. If you've had Chinese food from one restaurant, you've had them all. Not so. There can be good Chinese food and there can be bad Chinese food. Naturally, it's really all Americanized Chinese food anyway, but there are different ways of preparing the dishes.
Why is this place any different from any other Chinese restaurant? Well, for one thing, they're cash-only, which keeps their prices low. How low? Well, we frequent this place for their amazing $3.99 lunch specials. Those come with your main entree, your choice of rice (pork fried rice, plain fried rice, white rice, and probably other variations), choice of soup (wonton, egg drop, hot & sour, chicken & rice, and maybe one or two others) or a can of soda (whatever they have in stock at any given time, which seems to change from time to time).
If you aren't in the mood for a full lunch special and just want an entree, or if you come for dinner, the rest of their prices are extremely reasonable for the amount of food you receive, and it's all very tasty as well. You tend to get the same amount of food whether you dine in or take it to go.
When we stopped here for our meal, we met up with a longtime friend of ours named Doo Wop Pete. On this trip, Pete got the shrimp lo mein with pork fried rice and he had a soda to go with his meal instead of a soup:
Crissy had a variation on the same meal. Hers came with white rice and she also was able to special order the shrimp lo mein to have no vegetables, as she has an intolerance to onions, which seems to be a lot more common in people these days than it used to be. She also ordered her meal with the egg drop soup, which she enjoys a lot.
I like many of the dishes I've tried at this restaurant, including the chicken lo mein, sweet and sour chicken, fried wontons, boneless spare ribs, honey chicken (which can be ordered on the lunch special menu or on a specialty menu hanging on the wall of the restaurant - but be cautioned in advance that this dish comes with peppers mixed in as well, which I am not a fan of so I order the dish without them), beef with broccoli, lemon chicken, and so many others. However, in my opinion, what absolutely sets this place apart from any other Chinese restaurant I've tried is that they have a dish called Peanut Butter Chicken, which is just about the greatest thing on earth:
I have to thank Vanessa, a former boss of mine from when I used to work at Target, for suggesting I give this dish a try. It's been my absolute favorite thing on the menu since then. The chicken is cut up into strips and seems to have a different kind of breading on it than, say, their sweet and sour chicken, and is covered in some kind of peanut butter sauce that is just absolutely astounding (and this is coming from a guy who is not a big fan of peanut butter)! In fact, I miss this dish already and wish we could go back for more immediately.
I mentioned that we met a friend for lunch so we ate in at this restaurant. It's a rather small storefront, but they have five tables inside for people to either eat at (on dishes like these) or to wait for their order to be ready to go as a takeout order, which is what most people seem to do. They don't do delivery which is also another reason why they've been able to keep their prices so low (their lunch special price hasn't changed in all of the years I've been going there - and it seems that most websites claiming to have a menu for this restaurant do not actually have the correct menu information at all).
With the amount of food you get for the cost of the meal, this is definitely one of the better deals on the road that the Diehls have come across in our travels. We highly recommend you give this place a chance if you happen to be in the area and are looking for a delicious and filling meal for a very low price. I've never found another Chinese restaurant that compares to this one, and more places should strive to be as fantastic as this one has always been to me.
If you have comments about this restaurant, please let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment on this post. If there's a restaurant in your local area (whether or not it is local to us) that you'd like us to check out for a possible review on our blog, let us know by emailing us here.
We'll be posting our review for our next restaurant shortly, but until then, we'll catch you on the flip side!
This is Tom Diehl for Diehls On The Road, signing off....
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