Across the street from NOAA headquarters, Oriental East offers decent Chinese eats, quick service and peculiar furnishings in the men’s room. (Originally published Jan 10, 2007.)
First, the good news. Oriental East (1312 East-West Hwy) does decent, moderately priced Chinese food. A crispy batter coats the sweet-and-sour pork without getting doughy or greasy. (The sweet-and-sour chicken fares just as well.) The dish’s true flavor is in its tangy, cherry-red sauce.
For $8.95, the kitchen throws in a small bowl of soup, fried rice invigorated with scallions, a standard-operational egg roll exploding with cabbage, and a scoop of ice cream.
The stir-fried chicken with broccoli is served with a boring, soy-based brown sauce. A better bet is the stir-fried chicken with string beans ($8.95), which manages to keep the green beans crisp in a sweet and spicy brown sauce.
The tidy dining room is bathed in a soft pink glow and has large windows looking out onto neighboring shops. It’s also kid friendly, as evidenced by the slew of young families hitting it around dinner time. And despite the occassional crowd, service is brisk.
Now the bad news–and it’s a deal breaker.
For some strange reason, spare dining-room chairs are stacked and stored in the men’s room, inches away from urinals and toilet bowls.
The restaurant’s most recent health inspection cites a couple of infractions in the kitchen. However, it says nothing about urine-splotched chairs in the restroom or dining area. An ultraviolet light and a bottle of luminol could unveil some nasty secrets.
Oriental East, 1312 East-West Hwy, Silver Spring, (301) 608-0030
Originally published Jan 10, 2007.
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I have to confess that I didn’t know that about the men’s rooms.
Try Oriental East for dim sum on the weekend. Heavenly and the owners are scrupulously honest about the waiting list. Favored people don’t jump to the top of the list.
Oriental East carries both kinds of Chinese cooking: American-Chinese (sweet-n-sour pork, etc) and real old country cooking. Talk to your waiter and bypass the lunch specials if you’d like to try something good and a bit different.
I love Oriental East!
[...] with Giant supermarket, retail tenants include Oriental East, Mama Lucia, and a CVS Pharmacy. The Blairs is also home to The Silver Spring Penguin’s [...]
I think Oriental East is average to below-average. I’ve eaten there a couple of times and have never had a “good-memorable” dish. I did have a “bad-memorable” General Tso’s Chicken that had very little chicken attached to the chunks of chicken fat, though… Dim sum (although the best in the area which doesn’t say much about it) is bland and has a very limited selection.
I worked in the Blair’s office building for 10+ years – at one point OE was IT for food choices in South SS — we hated it, but we were stuck. Spring Garden is much better quality food and also much friendlier service.