Last Sunday brought yet another PortlandFood outing, this time to Chinese Delicacy, a restaurant on SE 82nd. 82nd Avenue is best known in Portland for its high population of cheapo car lots and perhaps even cheaper ladies of the evening — though I have to admit I don’t really know if the ladies are cheap or not. Unlike the car lots where the reader boards scream out their $599 deals, the ladies do not advertise prices.

Anyway… Over the last few years the still seedy strip has also become known for something unlikely for such a sketchy neighborhood: good food. The lower part of 82nd has become something of a nouveau Chinatown, or I should say Asiatown because many different Asian ethnicities are represented. There’s the mighty FuBonn shopping center anchoring the strip and plenty of quality eateries nearby to choose from: Pho Van, Pho Hung, Wong’s King, Malay Satay Hut, Bo Bun Hue and much, much more.

In the middle of this Asian wonderland is Chinese Delicacy. The name would suggest Chinese food and the decor speaks to old school Chinese American eats. But the owners are actually Korean and can bust out some primo dishes in any of the Chinese, Korean or Chinese-American idioms available to them. The PortlandFood group would get a chance to try all of these cuisines, in one convenient location.

I arrived a little late so I think I missed out on the first couple of dishes, not that I left hungry. Here’s a selection of the dishes I did get to sample.

Shrimp Dumplings with spinach (?). tasty, simple dumplings.

Korean Meatballs. Spiced Asianly and served in a gravy with assorted vegetables and mushrooms. The meatballs were wonderfully tender and very flavorful.

Meatball, singular.

Peking Style Egg Rolls. When they say “egg rolls” here, they mean it. These are paper thin, crepe style omelets with all manner of goodies wrapped up inside. Delicious.

The goodies inside the roll. really a fantastic dish. Note that if you head out here yourself, this is not on the menu and must be pre-ordered.

We got a couple orders of sweet and sour chicken and sweet and sour shrimp. This is the kind of Chinese food that my mother warned me about. It’s deep fried with a heavy batter in a sticky, sweet, gloppy sauce. Others seemed to be enjoying it very much, but after one bite, I abandoned it, choosing to save stomach space for other dishes. I mean, I like Chinese-American as much as the next person (after all, I *am* a Chinese-American!), but when there’s all this other good stuff on the table, it has to take a backseat.

The Korean classic, bulgogi. Theirs was excellent.

Pork Chow Fun Se. Nice, simple dish well executed.

Ma Po Tofu. Well spiced, nicely done.

Fried Chicken with Special Sauce. Special, indeed! These would have been worth the trip alone. Someday, there will be a knock-down battle between American Southerners and Koreans for the title of Fried Chicken Overlords and I, for one, want to be there to witness the competition.

There was also some excellent kim chi on the table and after dinner we got a lovely plate of orange slices and lychees. The lychees were good, but having the canned variety made me grateful that I will soon be in the land fresh lychees… and longans and rambutan and mangosteens…

All in all, I was very please with our meal, and of course, the company, too. If places like Chinese Delicacy continue to proliferate on 82nd then the much maligned avenue may soon slough off its bad reputation.