The original Chinatown Plaza stretches along the south side of Spring Mountain Road between Wynn and Arville. It opened in 1995. Since then, especially in the past five years or so, the distinctive pagoda-style architecture has spread out about a mile in both directions on both sides of Spring Mountain Road, and the storefronts offer everything from Asian language schools and acupuncture to herbs, jade, and Asian fashions.
A number of Asian restaurants stretch from the east end of the Chinatown facades to the west (with an emphasis, for some reason, on Korean cuisine). But within the original Chinatown Plaza, there are ten restaurants, serving: Szechwan, Mandarin, Shanghai, dim sum, and Chinese barbecue and seafood; Filipino; Japanese and sushi; and Vietnamese.
Capital Seafood Restaurant (702/227-3588, open 10 am to midnight), was named one of the Top 100 Chinese restaurants in the U.S. by Chinese Restaurant News in 2006, which judges more than 43,000 Chinese restaurants nationwide. It’s a Hong Kong–style seafood house (with three other branches in southern California). It has a huge menu (123 items); click here to see it: click here to see it. (We're addicted to the string beans with garlic sauce.)
Emperor's Garden Restaurant (702/889-6777, open 8 am to 10 pm) serves Mandarin and Szechwan cuisine. It specializes in spicy Szechwan, such as spicy fish and kung pao, but you can also get good sizzling scallops, mu shu, and walnut shrimp. The service is friendly and the food is reasonably priced. Emperor’s Garden also serves breakfast, with dumplings, buns, even Chinese-style egg tacos.
Kapit Bahay (702/889-4922, open 9-9) is the place for Filipino food, such as lechon (crispy pork), beef caldareta, and chicken or pork adobo; this cuisine is a bit fatty/greasy, but you won’t go wrong with pancit noodles (like chow mein) or lumpia (like egg rolls). A personal favorite is the sour pork sinigang soup, with green beans, spinach, cabbage, and pork in a tamarind base.
Mother's Korean Grill (702/579-4745, open 10 am to midnight) gets uniformly great reviews. Specialties include pul kogi (barbecued beef), spicy pork, and of course kim chi and kalbi (barbecued short ribs). They use gas grills instead of wood or charcoal, but that doesn’t seem to impact the barbecue flavors.
Pho Vietnam (702/227-8618, open 11 am-11 pm) is a favorite of some LVA staffers (see our review proudly displayed in their window), who tend to order the pho (with raw beef that cooks in the broth) and the bowl full of barbecued beef, rice noodles, and imperial rolls. But it has a huge menu of authentic, traditional, and fine Vietnamese food. (Note: Pho Vietnam now actually shares a front door with Capital Seafood and you can order off either menu -- it's all one big room owned by the same people, although one half is technically Korean and the other Chinese.)
Sam Woo BBQ Restaurant (702/368-7628) serves Hong Kong-style barbecue beef, pork, and duck, and though it’s usually been good when we’ve gone, it gets mixed reviews for quality, priciness, and service (particularly the attitude of the staff). There’s the typical big menu, with 40 different soups and some exotic items, such as blood porridge and deep-fried crispy intestine. Note that at Sam Woo, it’s cash only; no credit cards accepted.
There’s also Shanghai Taiyu Restaurant (702/889-8700, open 8 am to 10 pm), specializing in Shanghai food; Sushi Moto (702/368-4336, open 11:30 am-10:30 pm) for sushi and Japanese; and Chinatown Express Restaurant (702/364-1122, open 11 am-10 pm), serving Mandarin-style fast food.
