From noodles to whole fish, there are a wealth of special Lunar New Year dishes in different Asian cultures, and many of them are available locally this time of year.

Susan Qin has expanded her wholesale dumpling and chili oil business into a storefront near Mount Vernon Square — to the confusion of some hungry diners who live nearby.

Indochen is spreading its wings in Alexandria with a new location on King Street in Old Town and a menu of Indian and Chinese dishes.

“This month, we have felt the effect,” says one local manager. “Asian customers haven’t wanted to come out.”

Most of D.C.’s Chinatown restaurants and neighborhood take-out joints specialize in Americanized Chinese food, but if you’re willing to travel into suburbia, you can get a taste of the real deal. Here are some notable choices.

Earlier this week at The Atlantic, Damien Ma took D.C. proper and Chinatown, in particular, to task for having a “wholly disappointing Chinese food scene.” And as anyone knows, it’s been like that for well over 20 years, as the area’s increasingly affluent Chinese community fled to the suburbs. Ma rails against the American food chains that have taken over Chinatown and argues that Chinatown could be an ethnic food paradise, recommending that China subsidize restaurants as a method of diplomacy. I completely agree with the assessment that Chinatown lacks what I consider to be good Chinese restaurants. But this failure is not solely a result of big bad chains pricing restaurants out of the area.

Driving to Green Olive Buffet & Grill is like entering another world. The restaurant sits about halfway between Old Town Alexandria and Mount Vernon, an area little known to most Washingtonians. A 30 minute drive from downtown D.C., this stretch of Old Richmond Highway is a mix of newly developed shopping centers, chain restaurants, and relic motor lodges advertising vacancies and modern conveniences such as A/C and free HBO. That and the best old-school Chinese/American…

View Larger Map WUSA reports on what appears to be a string of Chinese carryout restaurants being targeted for armed robberies. The two most recent robberies took place on Saturday night. One of them occured at Eastern Carryout, located at 1784 Florida Ave NW. Owner Paul Chen told WUSA that three men came in through the rear door of the restaurant, forced Chen and his parents into the back and then pistol whipped his mother…

Eating Chinese food in D.C.’s Chinatown is frequently an exercise in disappointment. The English menus offer Americanized Chinese fare, and few of them do it well. In this sea of mediocre Kung Pao and General Tso, there is a shining light: Fried Good Dale. With no explanation on the menu of what a “Dale” might be, the diner is left to ponder the options: 1) Some sort of fish? 2) The unfortunate demise of Chip’s…

While there are many blogs out there that are little more than self-indulgement ramblings or highfalutin attempts at taste-making, according to a post I just read on Boing Boing, we can actually use this populist technology to engender social change, or something like that. So if you were as bewildered and disappointed as we were by the results of the Post’s Best Bets poll last year, we ask that you rally behind a noble cause…