Good, cheap, greasy honest Chinese food — the world wouldn’t turn without it. Here’s a paean to good, cheap, greasy honest Chinese food, especially the kind that they’ll still serve you at 10p.m. after you’ve spent half an hour stumbling around freezing Paris streets searching for a dinner place because the joint you looked up in the Zagat is now a gutted shopfront.
Thai Impérial is the usual run-of-the-mill Chinese restaurant with some Thai stuff bolted on. The kids who run it can’t be more than 30, and are among the friendliest restaurant staff I’ve seen in a while (a nice change after getting in a fistfight with a French truck driver. Welcome to Paris traffic.) Food arrives quickly and in decent portions; we had an order of beef dumplings, the three-course Peking duck (excellent) and some steamed coconut dessert thingies, plus Thai beers (sorry guys, Tsingtao tastes like rotten apples. Ugh.) Prices are what you’d expect as well; 50 euros for all that.
Oh, and they deliver too. Check it out.
Thai Impérial
52 Boulevard Beaumarchais
75011 Paris
+33 (0) 1 43 38 35 67
