Amazing 66

As a child, one of us loved Chinese food so much she decided she’d someday major in Mandarin in college. That didn’t happen, although today we live just a few miles north of thousands of fluent speakers. We’re talking about Chinatown, of course, whose streets you might walk down without hearing a lick of English. Recently we ate a pretty good, if expensive, lunch at Amazing 66: fresh but flavorless sautéed broccoli, tender chicken with snap peas in spicy black bean sauce, and tasty vegetable lo mein. It didn’t live up to its name -- or our memories of meals at Hunan Gourmet and Panda Garden -- but we’d still go back.